Early voting is underway for Virginia’s April 21 special election, which could help Democrats secure four additional congressional seats. The effort comes in response to moves by Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, to redraw maps and try to deliver Donald Trump up to nine more seats in the House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow edge: 217-214, plus one independent and three vacancies.

Last November, Californians voted to counter the Texas legislature’s actions to redraw congressional districts to benefit Trump, ultimately shielding him from investigations into his lawlessness and alleged abuses of power and corruption. The Roberts Court intervened in December to overturn a lower court ruling that the Texas maneuver–targeting five representatives, including Rep. Al Green (D-TX), a Black congressman elected ten times by Harris County, who has filed impeachment articles against Trump–violated the Voting Rights Act and legal precedents. That Roberts Court edict was issued, without full briefing or oral arguments, under the shadow docket (also called the emergency docket) without a full opinion justifying the reversal. Nonetheless, it signaled to other states that they could proceed with similar redistricting efforts.

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has steered the chamber away from any check on Trump’s power, with the exception of the few defections that forced a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein transparency law. That measure forced the administration to release files detailing the investigation into sex trafficking and sexual abuse orchestrated by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The files reveal the identities of numerous men who traveled on Epstein’s private jet, the “Lolita Express.” Trump’s name appears thousands of times, including in allegations by a woman that she was forced, as a child, to perform fellatio on him.

The stakes in Virginia are very high.

A U.S. House of Representatives under Democratic leadership could act as a robust check on Trump, including by investigating how then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump’s former criminal defense attorney) botched the requirements of the transparency law by redacting the names of potential predators while exposing the names of numerous survivors. A Democrat-led Congress could also be a powerful counterweight to Trump’s demands that more money be diverted from services the American people need–like Medicare and Medicaid–to fuel his foreign wars and reckless tax cuts for billionaires.

There has been a flurry of ads attacking the measure in Virginia, including these misleading mailers that were shared with me by some friends.

So who exactly is behind all of this?

A billionaire.

But not just any billionaire. Peter Thiel, one of the richest men in America.

Thiel is profiting enormously both from Trump’s massive tax cuts and the administration’s huge contracts with companies he controls, including Palantir Technologies and related platforms. Those entities have received more than $13 billion in contracts with the Trump administration for systems involved in deploying artificial intelligence tools or weapons. (Palantir is named for the fictional surveillance spheres depicted as powerful panopticons in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

Thiel has used another corporation, Per Aspera Policy Inc., to drive money into various elections backing politicians who want to make it harder for Americans to vote. The group backed Kris Kobach’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial run in Kansas and Blake Masters’ attempt to unseat U.S. Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. Kobach has notoriously sought to disqualify American voters with common names–and his campaign even hired a social media contractor who repeatedly “posted hateful comments about Jews and racial minorities on a white nationalist website” (the aide was fired after that story broke). Masters is known for his support for white nationalism and anti-Black rhetoric.

Per Aspera also spent big to get JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate for Ohio in 2022. Vance, who previously worked closely with Thiel in venture capital, was swept into elected office with a record-breaking $15 million in funding from Thiel. Vance was later chosen by Trump to be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election.

Now, Per Aspera is directing money into Virginia through a group that calls itself “Justice for Democracy PAC,” and is targeting Black households with grossly misleading mailers. Some use “Klan imagery,” while others feature Barack Obama and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (without their permission or their estate’s) alongside assertions that the redistricting proposal being voted on this month will hurt Black representation. Those claims run counter to public statements from Obama, who has specifically weighed in for the new maps, calling them essential to level the playing field. Almost all Black elected officials in Virginia, including state legislative leaders like Louise Lucas and Don Scott, along with Congressman Bobby Scott and others, strongly back the measure.

On paper, that PAC is led by A.C. Cordoza, a controversial Black Republican who lost his state seat in 2025, but the funding traces back to Thiel, a controversial white billionaire.

Thiel has publicly claimed “there is no problem with racism” and that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Why would–or should–anyone trust any ads meant to influence our democracy and elections that are funded by a tech billionaire who has expressed hostility toward our very system of government?

A biography published in 2021 also reported that Thiel told some of his Stanford Law School classmates that South Africa’s racial apartheid system was “economically sound,” a claim he has since denied (he spent part of his childhood in South Africa and Namibia). In 2024, The Guardian reported that leaked materials indicated Thiel had flown a eugenicist engaged in “race science”–who has made claims about racial hierarchies–to talks in Silicon Valley; Thiel did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.

Thiel also co-authored a book called “The Diversity Myth,” attacking the idea of multiculturalism at universities (he later apologized for asserting in the book that date rapes were just “seductions that are later regretted” by women).

Notably, Per Aspera’s corporate filing was signed by Trevor Stanley, a partner at the law firm of BakerHostetler, who previously represented Republicans opposing changes to absentee voting in Virginia during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanley was legal counsel to Kanye West in Virginia during West’s brief 2020 presidential run–a stint widely seen as designed to peel away Democratic votes for Joe Biden. Among other legal work, Stanley also represented amicus lawyers in a North Carolina case involving Republican efforts to make it harder to vote. An appellate court ultimately rejected those measures, finding that they violated the Voting Rights Act and related legal precedents.

Election lawyer Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket has reported on the flurry of ads in Virginia being fueled by Per Aspera and Cordoza’s PAC. As of April 1, Thiel’s group had given the operation at least $2.5 million. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones accused the PAC’s ad campaign of being “built on lies and racial division,” asserting that they “deliberately exploit the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to mislead Black voters and suppress participation.”

We will see next week if the Thiel-backed smear campaign succeeds or is rejected by Virginia voters. Meanwhile, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering an even broader pro-Republican ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case this summer. Stay tuned for more from Grave Injustice on the story behind that case and its implications.

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What I’m Reading:

• David Daley’s Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections

  • I’m re-reading this because, as Heather Cox Richardson noted, Daley’s book is “chilling and convincing … a must-read.” (I confess he kindly thanked me for my research in his acknowledgements.)

• Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket

  • This site provides reliable and compelling updates on the battle to protect the right to vote, being led by Elias, his team, and their colleagues.

• My chapter of John Roberts’s efforts to undermine the Voting Rights Act in my book Without Precedent, along with the congressional debates over the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to secure voting rights for Black men freed from slavery in the midst of the Civil War.

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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“I can’t believe … you think [it]’s normal or good that one person can dictate who the Department of Justice investigates and indicts,” the moderator of the American Bar Association’s “Rule of Law” panel recently said in response to remarks by John Lauro. Lauro, who represented Donald Trump after he was indicted for criminal interference in the 2020 election, replied: “That’s what the Supreme Court said,” referring to John Roberts’ opinion in the hyper-partisan ruling that invented criminal immunity for Trump.

It is neither normal nor good for a president to dictate DOJ investigations. But that is exactly what is happening in the aftermath of the reckless edict Roberts orchestrated for the leader of the political party that elevated him to Chief Justice.

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While presidents can set broad policies for DOJ–such as prioritizing the prevention of school shootings–no president since Richard Nixon has sought to abuse the Department of Justice to protect himself from prosecution or to go after his enemies, until Trump. For decades, DOJ guidelines have required impartiality and the insulation of prosecutorial decisions from political influence, as Sarah Wilson noted in a Miller Center report. Since 1939, for example, the Hatch Act has also barred federal employees from using their official authority or influence to interfere with elections. That law and related guardrails have long been reinforced in DOJ and White House policies and memoranda.

Yet Lauro, enabling his former client’s self-victimization, contends that no one has been more “abused” by the criminal justice system than Trump– a risible talking point that was recently reiterated by another one of Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

In his first press conference after Pam Bondi’s firing, Blanche blithely defended Trump’s directives to prosecute his political enemies, going as far as to claim: “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.” Blanche insisted that the only thing keeping him up at night was not Trump’s demands, but the need to “investigate every case that we have to the fullest extent of the law.”

Blanche also repeated Trump’s discredited claims about the “weaponization” of DOJ, ignoring that neither President Joe Biden nor Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed for a criminal investigation into his activities. Instead, Garland belatedly appointed a special counsel, under long-standing DOJ regulations, to independently investigate January 6 and Trump’s stealing away of classified documents. That independent review process has been used repeatedly by DOJ in order to avoid the politicization of prosecution decisions.

Blanche even had the audacity to dismiss reporting that Trump “wants to go after his political enemies” as “completely false,” framing the president’s demands as merely the pursuit of “justice”–which is a highly disturbing way of describing the very thing he claims to not be doing. Blanche, who is seemingly auditioning for the official job of Attorney General, also glorified the removal of federal prosecutors involved in the lawful investigations of Trump because–and get this–he claimed:

If you were a prosecutor and you were trying to prosecute your boss, you have ethical duties as a lawyer that I think prevent you from continuing to work in that environment. And … you had prosecutors that were absolutely not doing the right thing. And so, none of those prosecutors ... I hope everybody agrees that they shouldn’t work here if you’re not doing the right thing.

There is no such duty not to prosecute your boss if your boss is a criminal and your job is to prosecute criminals. Such a claim should be disqualifying for any DOJ appointee.

But the related reality is that John Roberts has made this disaster possible. By orchestrating a counter-constitutional ruling blocking Trump’s criminal prosecution, he effectively pardoned Trump and paved the way for his return to power, as I discuss in my new book, Without Precedent.

That illegitimate edict is also enabling Trump’s DOJ appointees to revive his debunked lies about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. In Georgia, for example, Blanche and Bondi’s handpicked prosecutor has apparently been working closely with Trump loyalists/conspiracy theorists to assail the election results in Fulton County, even though the five million votes cast there have been counted, re-counted, and counted again–as Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly attested.

Trump lost.

Nevertheless, at his behest, the FBI seized hundreds of pallets of ballots based on claims that they were not retained for 22 months as required by law, despite plain evidence that they were retained for more than five years. These facts did not prevent the issuance of an indictment for a supposed crime that would be beyond the statute of limitations even if proven. Plus, as Fulton County’s lawsuit challenging the seizure notes: the Trump administration did not tell the judicial officer who signed off that they were relying significantly on witnesses whose claims had been previously discredited.

None of this is normal or should be normalized.

But the broader responsibility lies with Roberts’ counter-constitutional immunity ruling, which asserted that presidential control over prosecutions is “conclusive and preclusive.” Roberts took that phrase out of context from a case where the Supreme Court ruled against President Truman in his attempt to control the production of American steel mills (it had nothing to do with prosecutions). Roberts wielded that phrase more than 20 times in his destructive opinion, as if repetition were a magical incantation that would transform his political assertions into an ironclad truth.

In that edict, Roberts claimed that because the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” over which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including alleged election crimes, the president can dictate who to prosecute. In shutting down special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the grand jury’s charges against Trump, Roberts claimed that the “indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.”

Those judicially-concocted claims–plus Trump’s vendettas and disproven lies–are precisely why we are now contending with a DOJ acting like it can do his bidding without facing any adverse consequences. The Republican-led Senate is also to blame for stupidly and cravenly confirming Trump’s defense attorneys to DOJ positions of power.

This crisis we are in has many authors, but Roberts and Trump are central players in the felling of vital, long-standing constraints on the abuse of prosecutorial power.

A reckoning must eventually come, but meanwhile we are living through the wreckage John Roberts has unleashed on America.

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What I’m Reading:

• Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department by Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis

  • This is a must-read report from investigative reporters examining how DOJ has failed to protect our democracy.

• Trump v. United States

  • Every time I read John Roberts’ claims in this ruling I am more and more appalled at how deeply destructive and outrageously arrogant it is in its destruction of the rule of law in America.

• And, of course, the U.S. Constitution.

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

Subscribe now

On April Fool’s Day, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging Donald Trump’s claim that he has the power to strip Americans of their citizenship. Trump showed up at the Supreme Court building to be present for the assertions of his Solicitor General, John Sauer, but left before the arguments of Cecillia Wang from the ACLU. His appearance made headlines, despite its actual insignificance.

Many reporters jumped on a narrative that painted the questioning by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Republican appointees as a kind of heroic skepticism. But that misses the point. Sauer tried to transform Trump’s hideous whims and fringe theories into legally binding mandates, and any justice who goes along with such flagrantly counter-constitutional claims should be decisively hounded out of office.

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Here are three things everyone should know.

1. Only an unrepentant Trump sycophant would rule in his favor on this issue

The Constitution is explicit: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

As the Supreme Court ruled more than 100 years ago in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that opening line of the 14th Amendment guarantees that everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, with only a few specific exceptions–children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces during an occupation.

To serve Trump’s agenda, Sauer concocted a spiderweb of Glenn Beck-style arguments asserting that Americans born to temporary U.S. residents or undocumented immigrants could be denied citizenship by any president. But no court has ever read the Constitution’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” text that way. The U.S. has always considered nearly everyone in the country to be subject to its jurisdiction, aside from those narrow exceptions noted above. (Meanwhile, in no other setting has Trump ever questioned DHS’ power to seize immigrants and subject them to our laws; if anything, he and his minions have urged agents to exceed the bounds of law to assail them.)

Sauer also claimed that only children of parents with “allegiance” to the U.S. can be citizens, but that is not at all what the 14th Amendment commands. It’s not even something that could be claimed of all of the Africans enslaved here before the Emancipation Proclamation–yet the Constitution nonetheless ordered American citizenship for them and their children, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted, based on the actual history. Plus, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out, does the administration really plan to depose pregnant women about their allegiances or their “domicile?”

Because the Supreme Court noted that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were “domiciled” in the U.S., Sauer tried to twist that dicta from the recitation of the facts into a condition for citizenship. It is not. Ultimately, Wong Kim Ark’s parents returned to China; U.S. law barred them from citizenship but not their son, who only had to establish that other Americans knew he was born here and remembered him from his childhood.

Of course, ultra MAGA justice Samuel Alito tried to advance Sauer’s effort to make a mountain out of a molehill. Even some of the Democratic appointees seemed to fall under Sauer’s spell briefly by acknowledging that the word “domicil” (sic) was mentioned 22 times in Wong Kim Ark’s case. But most of those references were about how domicile (a $10 word for home, or the place where someone intends to return or sink roots) was irrelevant to the command of the 14th Amendment. In fact, the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark’s case made clear that the children of “temporary sojourners” (visitors) were U.S. citizens if born here, under the longstanding common law of the U.S. and England conferring citizenship based on birthplace.

Sauer tried repeatedly to sidestep the holding in that case and pushed claims about the language in previous and subsequent immigration statutes. Accordingly, Sauer also focused some of his time on the congressional debate over a statute related to the 14th Amendment, even though establishing legislative or “original intent” through the statements of individual legislators for or against a provision can easily be cherry-picked and is fraught for other reasons. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination against all women, but the men who added that amendment proposed it as a poison pill to kill the bill–they never actually intended for women to get access to equal rights through that landmark law.

Plus, so-called “originalism” has been exposed as an optional political rather than principled tool by its proponents, not least by the Roberts Court’s invention of criminal immunity for Trump, in defiance of the Constitution and the discernable “original intent.”

2. Trump continues to try to defy the Constitution he swore to uphold

After Sauer’s argument, Trump posted on social media: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

That’s not true–more than 30 other countries follow “jus soli,” or birthright citizenship, too. But it is also besides the point. The countries that don’t do so are not governed by our Constitution, which follows the English common law rule dating back to the 1600s that citizenship is based on birth–meaning territory–with the narrow exceptions noted above.

If Trump wants to change that, he must work to propose and ratify an amendment to the Constitution–but he definitely does not have the votes needed to do so. He just claims he can dictate his desires, despite the law as Jamelle Bouie recounted.

The reality is that minutes after John Roberts administered the oath of office to Donald Trump on January 20, 2025–the oath that promises to faithfully execute the laws of the U.S. and defend the Constitution–Trump issued an executive order defying its plain command on birthright citizenship. This blatant disregard for the law came after Roberts’ own unprecedented and anticonstitutional ruling, giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution, helped effectively pardon him and clear the path for his return to power.

Immediately after regaining said power, Trump began defying the Constitution.

Not only that, the Roberts Court then aided him immensely–limiting lower courts’ ability to issue national temporary restraining orders in cases challenging his executive edict against birthright citizenship. The Court also allowed Trump to bypass the normal appellate review by the circuit and come directly to the Supreme Court with his claims.

Instead of letting the standard process play out and summarily affirm a ruling against Trump, a majority of the judges appointed to the Supreme Court chose not to do so.

Notably, Sauer also tried to claim the president can unilaterally block birthright citizenship because there are some companies selling travel to pregnant women to give birth here (which still does not change the Constitution). Meanwhile, investigative reporting showed that Trump profited from such tourism by pregnant Russians staying at his properties in Florida. On top of all that, there is the hypocrisy of him promoting a scheme he calls the “Trump Gold Card,” which allows super-rich foreigners to buy American citizenship for a $5 million fee.

3. The attack on birthright citizenship is brought to us by the same man who filled Trump with delusional notions about overturning the 2020 election

Although Trump has railed against so-called “anchor babies” or “chain migration” since his 2016 campaign, the legal agenda to strip Americans of birthright citizenship is a special project of John Eastman. He’s the Trump confidante and former clerk of Clarence Thomas who, in 2021, played a central role in pushing for Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College and promote what special counsel Jack Smith rightly called “fraudulent electors.” Eastman has since faced bar complaints and severe judicial criticism for his conduct in trying to block the lawful, peaceful transfer of power in the aftermath of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Eastman also filed an amicus brief supporting Trump in the case before the Roberts Court, on behalf of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing operation fueled by Thomas Klingenstein. Klingenstein, who chairs the Claremont operation, also funded Clarence Thomas’s 2020 vanity biopic along with Harlan Crow and other billionaires–as True North Research detailed a few years ago. A super-rich investor, Klingenstein has strongly defended Eastman’s role in 2020 and beyond.

The bottom line now is that the Roberts Court has legitimated the extreme revisionism of Eastman and his ilk by giving a case that could have been summarily affirmed against Trump a very high-profile platform–the forum of the nation’s highest court.

If, somehow, five or six Republican appointees are willing to rip the Constitution apart for Trump–as they did with immunity–it seems clear that it would not stop here. Once the groundwork to strip future Americans of their citizenship is laid, Trump and his backers would surely seek to do the same retroactively, as Madiba Dennie emphasized. They could reach back decades, denying passports for firmly established U.S. citizens and even destroying their right to live in their home country: America.

It is not beyond imagination to envision Trump relishing efforts to strip Kamala Harris of her American citizenship because her parents were foreign students in the U.S. After all, it was John Eastman himself who advanced the execrable claim, before the 2024 election, that supposedly Harris should not be eligible to run for president because of her parents’ status. If Trump were to win such a case, she could be just one of millions of Americans who would be harmed by another reckless ruling by the Roberts Court.

If the Court decides, however, to actually rule in accord with the Constitution and against Trump, it will only be because–like in the tariff case–the Constitution leaves no room for his claim. But the same was true in the immunity case and Roberts still invented a fictional doctrine to shield him from his abuses of presidential power.

Meanwhile, Roberts is poised to decimate the Voting Rights Act, and a ruling against Trump on birthright citizenship would give Roberts cover with the chattering class. Both-sideism pundits would likely emphasize that Trump doesn’t win 100% of the time with the Court (even though it has ruled for Trump almost all the time since 2024).

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What I’m Reading:

• Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

  • This book tells a story few Americans know about anti-Chinese racism.

• Garrett Epps’ Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America

  • This book details how equal rights became a constitutional command.

• And, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, of course.

P.S. I’m sorry to have been away for a bit. My beloved sister-in-law, Ellen Hanson, was fighting a fierce battle against cancer and passed away last month. That was really hard and I will miss her immensely. She encouraged me to keep fighting for our rights no matter what, so I am glad to be back on deck and back to promoting my book on John Roberts, Without Precedent, which becomes more timely with each passing day.

Over the past 24 hours, two countries have demonstrated what it means for no one to be above the law – an increasingly stark contrast to what is happening in America under the rules invented by John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Much of the destruction happening in the U.S. traces back to Roberts and his destructive and counter-constitutional grant of immunity to Donald Trump.

In the United Kingdom, Thames Valley police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Duke of York, on charges of misconduct in public office based on revelations in the Epstein Files. The King of England responded to his brother’s arrest by affirming, “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” adding that investigators “have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.” Even before the U.S. Department of Justice’s most recent partial release of the Epstein Files, Mountbatten-Windsor had been embroiled in controversy due to his long and close relationship with the notorious sexual predators Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Over a decade ago, Virginia (Roberts) Giuffre publicly alleged that Epstein and Maxwell engaged in illegal sex trafficking of her and other girls and women. In particular, she attested that she was trafficked to the man then known as Prince Andrew for sexual acts in London when she was 17 and later at Epstein’s infamous island compound on Little St. James. Though he denied wrongdoing, Mountbatten-Windsor settled her later civil lawsuit against him in 2022 and made a donation to a charity supporting survivors of sexual abuse.

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The criminal charges filed this week against him involve “misconduct in public office.”

That’s one way of describing the very thing John Roberts illegitimately sought to shield Trump from. Roberts coordinated with his fellow Republican appointees to concoct a broad and unprecedented grant of immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump for anything he claims is an “official act.” The actual allegations and evidence before the Court detailed Trump’s deeply damaging “misconduct in public office” in trying to subvert Americans’ votes: fomenting the January 6 insurrection, trying to get fake electors appointed to disrupt the Electoral College vote, and pressuring officials in Georgia to declare him the winner despite him losing the popular vote in the state, including in Fulton County.

Elsewhere, in South Korea, a Seoul District Court sentenced the country’s former president Yoon Suk-Yeol to life in prison for “abusing his authority and leading an insurrection related to his imposition of martial law in late 2024,” according to translated press accounts. The presiding judges noted that, as president, Suk-Yeol “directly and proactively planned the offense,” which “resulted in enormous social costs,” and that “it has been difficult to find any indication that the defendant has expressed remorse regarding this.” The same could be said of Trump, as former Special Counsel Jack Smith described the proof beyond a reasonable doubt that had been assembled before Roberts intervened – effectively pardoning Trump and paving the way for his return to power.

Likewise, the courts in Brazil convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of a conspiracy to “violently dismantle” the democratic rule of law and overthrow his electoral defeat. Last November, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting that coup. Trump has since tried to pressure Brazil to exonerate him (like Roberts did for Trump). Brazil has declined.

Accountability for crimes by elected officials – and even those of royal birth – is advancing everywhere but in the United States. It’s not all John Roberts’ fault. Years earlier, Alex Acosta, a George W. Bush appointee to the post of U.S. Attorney, cut the dirty plea deal that allowed Epstein to avoid more severe federal charges, despite substantial evidence of widespread abuse of underage girls.

And, though career prosecutors in the first Trump administration were allowed to pursue charges against Epstein and Maxwell, in Trump’s second term, his approach has changed. His hand-picked political appointees at the Justice Department – Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, both former defense attorneys for Trump – have taken a different tack. For example, they oversaw decisions including moving Maxwell from the prison she was originally serving her twenty-year sentence to a minimum security Club Fed style prison camp, where she is “much, much happier.”

For decades after Richard Nixon tried to direct the Justice Department to protect him from criminal liability, no president had dared to try to do the same, and long-standing agreements of separation between DOJ and successive White Houses prevented such interference.

What changed? John Roberts, in his illegitimate immunity ruling, gave Trump the green light to direct the Justice Department’s investigations and actions. Then, with the help of Senate Republicans, Trump installed two loyalists willing to do his bidding at the top of DOJ.

Not only have they been wielding criminal law to pursue Trump’s political enemies, they are actively preventing the full release of the Epstein Files, in what some contend is the biggest cover-up in DOJ history. Bondi told Trump last May that he was mentioned repeatedly in the files and then tried to stall their release, but Congress ultimately ordered their disclosure – with protections for the survivors and victims. She and Blanche seemingly spent hours approving redactions to the thousands and thousands of mentions of Trump, as well as the names of most of the men involved, while also managing to release the identities and other details about numerous girls and women.

Under Bondi and Blanche, DOJ has not charged anyone with an Epstein-related crime. They have not even bothered to interview the victims of the men whose names they redacted, which Bondi refused to apologize for. She even asserted that there is no evidence of potential crimes by Trump, despite evidence that needs to be investigated.

Other countries are taking this much more seriously. Norway’s former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, for example, was just charged with gross corruption over his ties to Epstein. In the U.S., Blanche had the audacity to state that it is no crime to party with Epstein, as Trump had repeatedly – sidestepping the allegations in the files.

He and Bondi act like people who know they will never be held accountable for their roles in this cover-up or anything else, while they say they have done nothing wrong. Perhaps that is because in the pernicious immunity ruling John Roberts orchestrated, he also sought to set the pardon power beyond any review.

So now we have a president who can commit crimes with impunity and pardon his accomplices – just like he did with the violent insurrectionists who attacked our Capitol on January 6, as he incited them to do. The violence in Minneapolis and other cities by ICE agents also seems emboldened by the notion that they too can get a piece of the immunity pie.

On issue after issue, it is Roberts’ original sin in the despicable grant of immunity that has emboldened Trump’s worst instincts. Roberts has unraveled the rule of law from the inside, even as lower court judges, for the most part, valiantly try to enforce the rules and laws in America.

No wonder Trump told Roberts a year ago: “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” Earlier this month, he said of the chief justice: “‘I had the nastiest, most vicious joke about John Roberts. If you think I’m going to tell that joke you can forget it.’” ‘I’m going to kiss his ass for a long time,’ he added, an apparent reference to the role Roberts could play in deciding current and future cases involving Trump and his administration.”

But it’s not a joke. It’s a real-life ongoing disaster. And it is up to we the people to honor the principle that King Charles reminded us of: the law must take its course. Through our voices and our votes, we must rebuke the Roberts Court and demand that justice and the rule of law – the vital principle that no one is above the law – be restored.

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What I’m Reading:

• Paul Krugman’s latest column, “Turning Our Back on Clean Energy,” mentions the Roberts Court.

  • He notes how the nation’s highest court has been captured and how it has advanced the agenda of the most powerful companies and people.

• Jose Andres’ book Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build a Better World Without Breaking Some Eggs

  • This is a truly inspiring memoir about World Central Kitchen and how we can help make our world a better place.

• The Declaration of Independence, of course.

State of the Swamp

Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

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Our screens are filled with heartbreaking images of the gang of marauders Donald Trump has inflicted on Minneapolis killing yet another American, ER nurse Alex Pretti, in cold blood. And, again, Trump’s top lieutenants rushed to defend the outrageous violence, immediately responding by smearing him and trying to murder the truth in broad daylight and with malice aforethought.

None of this would be happening if John Roberts had not invented immunity for Trump, whose violent wishes incited other loyalists to attack our Capitol on January 6, resulting in the deaths of five Capitol Police officers and the wounding of 140 others. Roberts, along with three Trump appointees and two other Republicans whose wives also compromised their impartiality, connived to rip up the rule of law for Trump, as I detail in my book, Without Precedent. Roberts himself orchestrated and wrote the reckless edict that freed Trump from facing a jury and the substantial evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt assembled by federal prosecutor Jack Smith.

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No wonder Trump went out of his way last March to enthusiastically thank Roberts, who paved the way for his return to power and illegitimately aggrandized him with more power than he’d ever had. For months before that foul ruling, Trump had been promising to pardon the 900+ people who were convicted of crimes against our nation on January 6. In his opinion in Trump v. United States, Roberts went even further, seeking to cement the notion that a president’s pardons are “official acts” beyond any judicial or legislative review or constraint. Almost one year ago today, after the Roberts Six helped sweep Trump back into power, he pardoned more than 1,500 of his rioters who violently tried to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

And now we are witnessing the results of Trump unleashing more than 3,000 heavily armed agents in Minneapolis and beyond. His swarming surrogates were loudly–and wrongly–told by Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, that they have “absolute immunity” in the aftermath of Jonathan Ross killing Renee Nicole Good by shooting her point-blank through the left temple as her car turned away from him. Trump appointee Kristi Noem perversely called the Minnesota mom—who told Ross “I’m not mad at you,” moments before he killed her—a “terrorist,” but the only ones terrorizing the residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul are those who report to Noem.

Trump’s adjutants at the heads of the Department of Justice and the FBI–Pam Bondi and Kash Patel–have actively blocked Minnesota law enforcement from investigating Good’s homicide, pushed for Good’s wife to be prosecuted, and have kept police away from vital evidence–resulting in six federal prosecutors and an FBI agent resigning. And Trump’s proxies are doing the same again. After Pretti was shot, his stormtroopers again did nothing to try to save his life; instead they counted the bullet holes. Two Trump thugs fired ten bullets to execute Pretti and then fled the scene of the crime, with their faces masked and their identities cloaked. Now Bondi is attempting to extort Minnesota’s voter rolls in exchange for ending Trump’s violent siege of the Twin Cities.

This blatant abuse of power–and the reckless assertion of absolute immunity itself–warrants impeaching Trump, Vance, Noem, Bondi, and Patel, along with imposing criminal and civil liability for the violent destruction they have unleashed and condoned in Minnesota and elsewhere. Their underlings–including Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, and Todd Lyons–also need to be held accountable for deliberately depriving people of their rights while praising the killers. Modern history provides many precedents for how independent tribunals have held government actors accountable for violating human rights. A Minnesota Supreme Court judge, William Christianson, presided over key Nuremberg trials, which St. Paul resident, Captain Horace Hansen, helped prosecute, as the Minnesota Military & Veterans Museum in Little Falls marked in November. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is using a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to collect ICE crimes. State and federal legislative committees can also conduct investigations.

Every state must also review its criminal and tort laws to ensure they are adequate to respond to Trump’s round-up gangs and their illegal, violent actions. If not, states should enact emergency legislation akin to the Ku Klux Klan Act (42 USC 1983) to ensure that any federal agent “who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, … subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States [or their state] or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws [including the state Constitution and statutes], shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.” Justice cannot wait forever, and litigation and litigators, like Democracy Forward and the ACLU, need support to pursue it.

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Additionally, if current defamation laws are not robust enough, let’s reform them, too. Maybe the law needs to be strengthened to make it clear that murder victims and their families–as well as states, cities, towns, and state or local officials–can sue Trump and his defenders for their slander. To reduce barriers, perhaps the law should be changed to allow families and governments to be reimbursed for their legal fees and expenses, and defamation damages for the surviving families should be set exceptionally high. Why not? Every lawful tool available to secure justice should be on the table.

On behalf of the people they are elected to represent, state leaders should also consider making clear that any assertion of immunity from criminal or civil law will be considered null and void when federal agents are operating within state borders without its governor’s consent. We should let juries decide the facts, including any purported claim of self-defense, without allowing fabricated impunity to block accountability.

Why should we accept claims of federal supremacy when the federal government is being used as an illegitimate tool to punish states that did not vote for Trump and as a weapon to gain access to voter rolls? Plus, until the reckless funding of these roving bands of attackers that was pushed through by cowardly Trump-backers can be clawed back, it seems clear we need better state laws to protect our rights. Penalize uninvited agents who hide their faces. Fine them if they don’t wear nametags and turn over body-cams. Prosecute them for fleeing crime scenes. Anyone, no matter their title, who helps conceal the identities of killers should be charged as an accessory after the fact or with obstruction of justice. This crisis demands new and bold thinking.

Secret police have no place in America.

They have no right to kill Americans who peaceably assemble and dissent, who blow whistles, or who film the agents’ violent acts. They have no right to maim or blind witnesses. They have no right to kill a lawfully armed American with a holstered gun. They have no right to break down doors of people’s homes or shatter their car windows without a warrant issued by an impartial judge based on real evidence of a crime–or an actual emergency to save someone’s life. They have no right to disturb our peace.

Just as Trump does not have a right to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, despite his menacing jokes, his agents have no legitimate license to kill our First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights, which apply to citizens and immigrants alike (expressly to “people” or “persons”). The founding generation, which demanded those rights be written into binding law before voting to ratify the Constitution, had seen firsthand how liberties were arrogantly violated by the redcoats, who asserted the power of writs of assistance–general warrants that allowed them to invade people’s homes. So where are the judges on the nation’s highest court who repeatedly invoked so-called “originalism” to dismantle precedents like Roe.

It sure seems like it was just marketing by them, along with Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society. Where are those supposedly principled “conservative” lawyers, those summer soldiers, now, in these times that try our hearts and souls? We the People have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and no president—MAGA or otherwise—should have the power to trample on those rights and abuse our cities. Standing united against secret police in America should be uncontroversial, but FOX and other stenographers continue to replay Team Trump’s made-for-TV claims in spite of the facts.

No one should enjoy immunity for giving or following illegal orders that plainly violate our Bill of Rights. No president should be allowed to pardon people who break the law at his behest or immunize his co-conspirators in the deprivation of our rights.

As Rep. Jamie Raskin recently wrote, January 6 never ended. Trump’s ongoing insurrection–enabled by the Roberts Court–continues in his attacks on our laws, our neighbors, and our communities. That includes the harassment known as #KavanaughStops, taking place because the Roberts Court issued shadow docket dictates overturning temporary restraining orders. Now those #KavanaughStops have metastasized into #KavanaughKillings. The predictable and deadly consequences of the Roberts Court’s decrees inventing immunity for the insurrectionist-in-chief–and emboldening him with 20 unprecedented emergency rulings in his favor last year–must be roundly condemned.

The courageous, compassionate nonviolence of Minnesotans is a beacon of hope for what kind of world is possible when we stand together in solidarity. There is so much we are going to need to fix once we prevail, including reforming the Court itself, in order to right the wrongs and help our freedoms thrive. As America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us renew our commitment to each other and to the inalienable rights our founding fathers so bravely proclaimed.

#NoKings #NoKings #NoKings Forever.

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What I’m Reading:

• The American Crisis, a series by Thomas Paine, who wrote Common Sense.

• Judge Michael Luttig’s illuminating analysis of the Declaration of Independence and how Trump’s actions, as of July 4th of last year, aligned with King George.

  • Please watch my interview with Judge Luttig on this constitutional crisis.

• And, the Bill of Rights of our Constitution.

  • That includes the Fifth Amendment, which provides that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”

Substack Live

Please join me this Wednesday 1/28 at 1 PM Eastern for a Substack Live with Camaron Stevenson, COURIER’s national correspondent, about Citizens United, the Roberts Court and more.

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ICYMI: Gloves Off is officially live

COURIER founder and publisher Tara McGowan kicked off her new show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a candid, yet hopeful conversation about power, courage, and what real leadership actually looks like. Stream the first episode now on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Today marks the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, issued in 2010 by a partisan group of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That ruling has profoundly degraded the American political system in the 16 years since, allowing the ultra wealthy to throw their weight behind politicians and policies that benefit them, often at the expense of the rest of us. In that edict, the nation’s highest court–helmed by Chief Justice John Roberts–grafted onto our First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech the radical notion that money is speech, and that Congress has no power to restrict such “speech” (that is, spending) by outside groups seeking to influence elections.

The Roberts Court claimed that such spending would be of little value if it could not be controlled by the candidate, even though it is self-evidently valuable to have others get their hands dirty on attack ads while candidates maintain a plausible distance. The ruling is also illegitimate because Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself even though his billionaire benefactor–big-time Republican donor and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow–had secretly bankrolled Thomas’s wife Ginni with a $500K donation to help her launch a Tea Party group poised to exploit the 5-4 ruling where her husband was about to cast the decisive fifth vote.

As of 2023, Crow had spent at least $13.8 million influencing federal elections since Citizens United.

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Building on that farce, subsequent judicial decisions have struck down limits on contributions to “independent expenditure committees,” allowing billionaires to spend unlimited amounts to affect election outcomes, provided their names are disclosed. Other rulings allowed nonprofit groups, called (c)(4)s, to donate to Super PACs while disclosing only the group’s name. The (c)(4)s routinely keep their big donors secret.

It is a complex chess game the Roberts Court has been playing with American democracy, one that has decimated anti-corruption reforms designed to limit the power of the super rich in the representative democracy America presents itself to be.

Let’s consider one of the most dramatically disruptive and recent consequences of Citizens United and its progeny: Donald Trump’s assault on Greenland’s independence.

Trump’s menacing words and actions are shattering alliances that have helped keep Americans safe for decades. The unnerving situation we and the world find ourselves in is not just the consequence of Trump’s egomaniacal and seemingly demented threats. It is also a world-shaking effect of America’s broken “campaign finance” and anti-corruption system, which is directly due to the partisan interference of the Roberts Court in election law–and in creating anti-constitutional criminal immunity for Trump.

How did we get to the brink of a hot war with Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? The answer is money in U.S. politics, money that is now proving to have disastrous effects not only here at home, but on a global scale.

It is also a combination of greed and Trump’s obsession with dominating people and places. As he once told Billy Bush, there was a pretty woman he wanted “to f*ck” so, though she was married, he “moved on her like a b*tch” and “failed.” But this time, it is not a woman–or unwilling women, like E. Jean Carroll–but an unwilling island bound to Denmark and the European Union, some of America’s closest allies.

According to The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, the origin of Trump’s plan to take over Greenland was spawned by Ron Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetic fortune, who backed Trump’s election. Here’s the story in that book:

‘A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,’ Trump told [National Security Advisor John] Bolton, ‘What do you think?’ Lauder then came to see Bolton, revealing that he had been discussing Greenland with the president and had offered himself up as ‘the back channel to the Danish government to negotiate Greenland,’ as Bolton would later recount.

When the Wall Street Journal broke the news of Trump’s obsession with Greenland in 2019, its ministry responded succinctly that the island was “open for business, not for sale.”

Since Trump returned to the White House in 2025, his fixation has only intensified. Lauder has been stoking the fire from the jump and wrote an op-ed titled “I’m a Greenland expert — these 3 paths can make it America’s next frontier” just days after Trump’s second inauguration. In it, he stated he had “worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.” Oh, really? He then touted the rare earth minerals that lie beneath the island’s ice and rock. While Lauder did not propose a military invasion in that op-ed, his talking points about Greenland’s strategic value have been echoed by Trump sycophants like Ted Cruz, in defense of Trump’s goal of just “taking” the big island and his desire for us to “own” it.

Would it surprise you to know that Lauder is invested in pursuing rare earth minerals, including mining operations in Greenland? Maybe not, at this point. But it’s true. And Trump has seemingly been working hard for his benefactors, which include other billionaires, too. From the outset of his second term, Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainian president to trade access to rare earth minerals for U.S. aid. Volodymyr Zelenskyy ultimately gave into that pressure last year.

Who stands to gain from access to those minerals? According to the New York Times, a “consortium including TechMet, an energy investment firm partly owned by the U.S. government, and Ronald S. Lauder, a wealthy friend of Mr. Trump, has engaged with Kyiv to bid on a Ukrainian lithium field.” Earlier this month, Techmet secured a deal with Ukraine. Those fields are valued in the trillions of dollars, and Greenland’s could be, too.

That’s a pretty good potential return on investment. Lauder backed Trump during his 2016 campaign and, after Trump won, the two men were photographed shaking hands at Mar-a-Lago a month later. Trump then reportedly deployed him on secret “diplomatic challenges” in his first term, while Lauder gave $100,000, twice, to the “Trump Victory” PAC.

Though their relationship briefly cooled when Trump was out of power and dined with antisemite Nick Fuentes, their relationship has warmed again with Trump’s re-ascendance. Not only did Lauder continue his push for Trump to get control of Greenland last February, he also gave $5 million to MAGA Inc. last March. They’ve known each other since college, but Citizens United and its progeny have helped amplify Trump’s expectations of tribute for access or favors and his self-aggrandizement as the world’s best dealmaker. As with Venezuela, Trump views Greenland as a way to seem powerful by rewarding those who back him with the spoils he seizes–befitting the only convicted criminal to be elected president in U.S. history. Trump is a walking, talking, grifting result of the influence machinery the Roberts Court let loose.

Lauder has done nothing wrong under the rules the Roberts Court has remade to allow the super-rich to set the policy agenda of elected officials. Those rules permit donors to max out on direct donations and then pour millions more into Super PACs and other groups. Notably, Lauder has spent millions over several years on an attack ad group, initially aligned with the Tea Party, called “National Horizon.” It was created with help from C. Boyden Gray, who worked with Leonard Leo to install all six judges in the Roberts Court majority. Lauder has also been a major funder of an attack-ad group called “Safe Together New York,” which recently settled an investigation alleging unlawful coordination with Republican Lee Zeldin, without conceding any wrongdoing.

Though Lauder is not even the biggest spender among the billionaires currying favor with Trump, his history of spending in politics helps illustrate the impact of Citizens United. In the twenty years before that decision, he gave a total of $681,676 to federal candidates and committees. Since 2010, Lauder has spent over $32 million on candidates and PACs–not including any secret contributions to (c)(4) groups, which remain unknown. Although Lauder was super rich before 2010 and a regular funder of Republicans, only 2% of his political spending happened before the Citizens United ruling when such soft money and dark money spending was more restricted. Overall, 98% of his money in politics came after the Roberts Court blew the dam wide open.

Those millions–like the $5 million he gave to MAGA Inc. last year–are politically potent, but a pittance to him personally. With an estimated net worth of nearly $5 billion from his family fortune and various investments, that $32 million in political spending constitutes just 0.64% of his wealth. That’s like an American household with a median net worth of $192,900 spending $1,234–or roughly $6 a month–on politics since Citizens United. Such comparatively miniscule spending by ordinary voters would never bring America to the brink of war to seize a foreign territory. In a healthy democracy, no one–no matter how good they say their intentions are–should be able to spend so much and wield such outsized influence on our nation’s actions.

Billionaire money to influence elections and divert public policy doesn’t just speak, it yells.

Citizens United has unmoored America’s democracy from its founding aspiration of governance by We the People (the demos), not by kings or their patrons. If our democratic republic is going to survive, we will have to reform the Roberts Court and restore common-sense brakes on the distorting power of billionaires.

We can fix this. We must. The deadly crisis of Trump pillaging Greenland is just the tip of the iceberg if we don’t.

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What I’m Reading:

• The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by investigative journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

  • I use Kindle to search books, like this one, for excerpts on key happenings, but now I am going to read the book from cover to cover.

• My book–I just finished the recording of the introduction and the publisher is preparing the full book for its audio release! I am over the moon about it!

• And, the Declaration of Independence, which is especially illuminating now as we bear witness to what Trump and his paramilitary force are doing to Minneapolis.

  • Many sentences jump out, including: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

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John Roberts continues to gaslight America, even as nearly every day we see the harmful consequences of his machinations to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity for his so-called “official acts.” Just last week, Roberts issued what has rightly been called a “feckless” report asserting that the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “remain firm and unshaken.”

I’d say such a claim could not be further from the truth, except that with each passing day, America slips further away from the truths our founding documents sought to uphold. Though on any given day the act may be committed by the president or one of his agents, none of this would be happening without Roberts illegitimately using judicial power to prevent Donald Trump from standing trial for the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Contrary to Roberts’ claim, our Constitution is not unshaken. It is, in fact, very shaken.

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We need to understand that this crisis is not just Trump alone. MAGA Chief Justice Roberts struck out the central pillar protecting our liberty by manufacturing the notion that a president cannot be prosecuted for breaking the criminal laws of the United States through his actions as president.

In honor of the anniversary of January 6, I re-read Roberts’s counter-constitutional opinion on behalf of himself and his fellow Republican appointees. His outrageous declarations in that ruling grow more untenable with every passing day. His opinion–unhinged from the actual text of the Constitution, which commands that a president’s duty is to faithfully execute the law–repeatedly declares that a massive array of actions by Trump or any president are beyond the reach of our criminal laws.

According to Roberts’s invention, as long as Trump claims he is acting in his official capacity–which is what Trump and his lawyers claimed he was doing when he tried to overthrow the results of 2020 election and stop the Electoral College votes from being counted–he can face no criminal consequences. The limits on this immunity are scant.

Throughout that hyper-partisan opinion, Roberts asserts that Trump had and now has all sorts of powers that previous presidents and Congresses have rejected, such as the power to direct political prosecutions by the Justice Department. That practice has not been allowed in the U.S. since that crook Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the independent prosecutor investigating his crimes. Although Robert Bork did the deed, after the men above him at DOJ refused, since Watergate, every president–Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush (for at least part of the time), Barack Obama, and Joe Biden–abided by a set of rules to prevent the politicization of the awesome power of federal prosecution.

But not Trump. And Roberts’s foul opinion blesses the destruction of those boundaries by asserting that, of course, presidents can direct prosecutions. That’s exactly what Trump is doing now in his second term, with the help of handmaids like Pam Bondi and errand boys like Todd Blanche, whose previous private jobs were as personal lawyers defending Trump against the crimes and misdeeds he was accused of. Now, thanks to the Republicans in the Senate, his criminal defense lawyers are being paid by us to do his vengeful bidding.

It is genuinely disgusting to watch how these appointees have defiled the Justice Department. It was once an honor to me to share that I was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and had the honor of working at Main Justice, walking into the building each day under the engraving “The Place of Justice Is a Hallowed Place.” I used to say it was hallowed by the devotion of civil servants who set aside partisan politics and their religious beliefs to serve all of the American people, to advance justice. Not anymore.

Roberts, in essence, gave Trump advance permission to turn the Justice Department into his personal prosecution arm. Bondi’s appalling actions at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing late last year dripped with grotesque theatrical contempt for Democratic Senators engaged in legitimate oversight. She has similarly assailed “Democrat” prosecutors, injecting offensive partisan derision while wearing the title of Attorney General. In countless ways, she acts as though she shares Trump’s immunity.

And in some ways she does, again thanks to John Roberts. His gift of immunity when paired with the pardon power–which Roberts also sought to insulate beyond any review or check whatsoever–has created the very real, very dangerous scenario in which Trump can commit crimes and urge his minions to do the same with the implicit promise that he will pardon them. America has never faced such a threat to justice and the rule of law.

This is a recipe for disaster, for Americans and the world–an open invitation to the kinds of war crimes we have already seen, including the deadly attacks on drowning men whose boats were wrecked by our missiles off the coast of Venezuela. That same lawlessness is reflected in Trump’s unprecedented actions last week: ordering the seizure of the leader of Venezuela, claiming that the U.S. can simply take said country’s oil, and–as of this week’s Senate briefing–claiming a right to put any revenue into offshore bank accounts he would control, while cutting refining deals with U.S. oil companies. In other words, this is what Senator Chris Murphy called “an insane plan.”

And let’s not forget the ongoing onslaught of American communities by armed, masked, poorly trained Trump loyalists targeting immigrants and citizens with aggression. We have seen numerous acts of violence and profound disrespect that Trump and his minions have blessed as acceptable and even great, while disparaging any dissent.

The Roberts Court buttressed its immunity ruling by using the shadow docket last year to overturn 24 lower court orders trying to protect against Trump’s transgressions of the law, including efforts to limit the ways his masked agents have been deployed to swarm our communities and send immigrants to hellholes like CECOT.

It is sadly inevitable that some of the thugs recruited with outlandish $50K bounties will shoot and kill people, like what happened just yesterday in Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good was shot in cold-blood by a masked man wearing “federal police” insignia. Rather than condemn the act, Trump, his operatives, and his fan base immediately attacked the victim instead. This was yet another spit of fictional vomit spun by the same White House that has posted a false history of January 6, claiming that the violent insurrectionists Trump incited that day were “innocent” protestors.

Yet, John Roberts still has the audacity to use the mantle of his office to proclaim that the Constitution is “unshaken.”

This is shocking judicial gaslighting. It is rank and wrong. The United States and the world are being deeply shaken by Trump’s lawlessness.

That lawlessness is due in large part to Roberts effectively pardoning Trump, which helped sweep him back into the presidency, endowing him with even more power than he had before. One of the things that really stands out as especially jarring in Roberts’ immunity edict is his claim that the real threat to our constitutional system is a president who might behave cautiously due to fear of criminal prosecution… FOR. COMMITTING. CRIMES., crimes that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, as Jack Smith recently attested. That argument was rotten from the start, and it did not age well.

Roberts even claimed that what we should really fear is an “enfeebled” president who does not take “bold” action due to concern that he or she could be held accountable under our criminal laws–an absurd construct in the context then and worse now.

Even as he asserted that “no one is above the law,” Roberts placed Trump above the law in almost every meaningful way. Quite frankly, how dare he. Ultimately, we will need to see a real reckoning and correction of this destruction. This is not a mere policy dispute: it was a partisan political act that has wrecked our constitutional order.

Roberts knowingly orchestrated this ruling amid glaring conflicts of interest. He allowed Clarence Thomas to participate in the immunity case, despite his wife Ginni Thomas’s documented involvement in the fake elector scheme. And he accepted the vote of Sam Alito, whose wife had hoisted a symbol of January 6 over their home. The three Trump appointees–two occupying seats stolen from Democratic presidents–joined that ruling without any shame of the illegitimacy of them exonerating their benefactor. There was no judicial humility or restraint. The Roberts Court has shaken our very foundations.

Roberts has been gaslighting America from the outset. But to do so on New Year’s Eve after seeing the devastating consequences to American society and world order over the past eleven months is more than gaslighting. It is self-serving propaganda.

We absolutely have to reform the Court to restore our rights or Roberts and his faction will continue to redefine the rule of law to bless the lawlessness, injustice, and imperialism of the wannabe despot that we are bearing witness to every single day.

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What I’m Reading:

• A virtual exhibit about the life of Crispus Attucks who was shot by British troops at the Boston Massacre.

  • This historical project was created with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts a few years ago: “Reflecting Attucks is a virtual exhibit that examines the memory of Crispus Attucks, a man of African & Native descent who was the first to die in the Boston Massacre, an event now regarded as the start of the American Revolution.”

• The introduction to my book–out loud–for the audio version of Without Precedent, which will be finalized this month and then widely available for those who prefer to listen to books on tape.

  • I am also working on travel to cities and towns across the country this winter and spring to talk about the book and the vital need to reform the Roberts Court.

• And, of course, the Constitution, with a particular focus on how we can reform the pardon power which surely cannot be absolute. For example, the First Amendment’s protection of free speech has been interpreted to allow suits for libel, to allow words of conspiracy to be used in criminal prosecutions–like some of the charges against Trump that Roberts blocked–and, of course, because everyone knows you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. Why should we tolerate the pardon power being abused by a president for his co-conspirators or other lawlessness by his minions? Of course we should not.

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Democracy dies behind a paywall, so our journalism is and will always be free to our readers.

But to be able to make that commitment, we need support from folks like you who believe in our mission and support our unique model.

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Some witty fellow Americans have dubbed Wednesday night’s nationally televised lie-fest “The Pettysburgh Address.” It’s a new low, but really, after everything that Donald John Trump has done and said in 2025–including this week’s vile slander of Rob Reiner–it is beyond clear that there is no bottom. Another day, another dollar, and another noxious act or foul toot. The vainglorious homunculus in the White House is singular in his impetuous destructiveness, compared with all of his predecessors, in ways big and small that actually harm people and routinely shatter one’s peace of mind.

But Trump did not get here alone. The high court, led by John Glover Roberts Jr., super-charged him–even though Trump embodies the worst fears of America’s founders.

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As I wrote in my new book, Without Precedent:

Whatever extremes Trump pursues in 2025 and beyond, these sins must fall at Roberts’s feet too. Roberts broke the central pillar upon which our Constitution is built: the American president is not a king… Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress let Trump get away with appointing the most unqualified, reckless, and dangerous cabinet in all of U.S. history.

Just two years ago, in 2023, Trump was facing multiple grand jury indictments: four felonies for his efforts to subvert his 2020 election loss by inciting the January 6 insurrection, 40 counts for taking and mishandling classified documents that he stored in bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, 13 counts for criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 election count, and 34 counts (on which he was convicted) for falsifying business records. The Supreme Court of Colorado had ruled that the state could keep Trump off the 2024 ballot because he had engaged in an insurrection, a constitutional bar under the 14th Amendment that only an affirmative act of Congress could waive.

But then John Roberts took an ax to the law to save Donald Trump.

As the New York Times detailed, it was Roberts who orchestrated the 6-3 hyper-partisan, counter-constitutional edict declaring Trump immune from criminal prosecution for his so-called “official acts” as president, including his actions on January 6 and before. The Roberts Court also took up the cause of other criminals convicted for the violent acts on January 6 as they sought to interrupt the official counting of the Electoral College votes, under a statute Roberts rewrote to apply only to securities cases, not the security of the peaceful transfer of power being conducted at the Capitol. That was one of the four charges special prosecutor Jack Smith was pursuing against Trump; Smith recently testified under oath that there was evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict him.

Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have bookended Trump’s presidency with protection, giving him criminal immunity both retrospectively and prospectively. They’ve issued 24 shadow docket rulings siding with Trump to summarily overturn detailed factual findings of other judges that an array of Trump’s actions since January 2025 have violated the Constitution, statutes, rules, contracts, and/or long-standing legal precedents. This one-two punch has fueled Trump’s delusions that he can do almost anything he wants.

The Roberts Court is out of control. It is acting like an arm of the Republican Party, not like a fair court. It is trying to help Trump rig the 2026 midterms. That’s what the Texas ruling was all about, despite trial court findings that there was evidence the Texas legislature redrew voting maps along racial lines in violation of the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts’ personal devotion to weakening the Voting Rights Act is why the Court is poised to eviscerate that landmark legislation in the Callais case, though he is not on a solo mission; his fellow GOP appointees yearn for that, too.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

We have to take some solace in the fact that more and more people now understand that the highest court has been captured in order to roll back our rights. It is aggressively aiding Trump and entrenching Republican power. If we cannot see that the Roberts Court is broken, we cannot fix it. And we have to fix it and limit its destructiveness, or this pattern will continue for years to come.

All legal options need to be on the table: impeachments, term limits, jurisdictional repairs, real and binding ethics rules with consequences, and more. When a majority comes to power to restore and expand voting rights, it will need to include court reform–or those statutes will not survive a Roberts Court that has been eager to abet Trump and whoever the heirs to his regressive, repressive authoritarian agenda may be.

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What I’m Reading:

• I’m still re-reading my book as I work with reporters and allies to help people understand how we got here and how to fix it. Plus, I am actually reading the introduction to the book out loud for the coming audio version in 2026! In the meantime, you can get the hard-bound version at a 20% discount here.

• Pleasure reading for the holiday break! I’m reading Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, and it is so lovely.

• And, of course, the Constitution, with a view toward what needs to change, like the succession rules in the 20th and 25th amendments, among other things.

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The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court are acting in a deeply partisan way to inappropriately aid Donald Trump and the Republican governor of Texas to try to pre-rig the 2026 midterms by allowing maps that dilute Black and Latino votes in violation of the longstanding rules of the landmark Voting Rights Act, under Section 2 of the VRA.

John Roberts first used the Court to take an ax to the VRA in 2013 and arrogantly supplanted detailed congressional findings in support of reauthorizing Section 4’s enforcement provisions in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, like Texas. The Court’s new shadow docket order is another sign of how drunk with power the Roberts Court is and how willing its Republican appointees are to twist the law and ignore the facts in order to aid the party that engineered its majority. Americans are going to need to redouble the efforts to register more voters and to reform this Court or it will continue to strip away vital rights that generations before us sacrificed to secure.

My analysis below, first published in Grave Injustice in October, details how and why the Roberts Court is posing such a grave threat to our freedoms in allowing the rules to be rewritten to protect Trump and undermine truly representative democracy in our republic, yet again.

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the part of that landmark legislation John Roberts spent hundreds of hours trying to limit when he launched his legal career. Few people know that because most coverage of this litigation does not mention it.

Just three years ago, Roberts signaled that the long-standing legal precedents that allowed Black Americans to challenge the dilution of their votes were in trouble. They were “controversial,” he said, but still binding law for now. In that case, the other five Republican appointees to the Court allowed maps drawn in Alabama – maps that three lower court judges found to be illegal under the Voting Rights Act – to be used in the 2022 midterm elections. They claimed it was too close to the election to redraw the maps to comply with Section 2. That decision was issued the first week of February and paved the way for similar maps drawn by Republican legislatures that diluted Black voting power to be used in Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida.

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The result? Republicans took control of Congress, with four seats more than the 218 they needed. It was not the “red wave” Republicans had been hyping, and Mike Johnson would not have become Speaker of the House without the Roberts Court’s intervention. That election put an end to any further investigations into the violent insurrection Trump incited on January 6 and also allowed Republicans to block Biden’s legislative agenda.

After those midterms, Roberts took his pen to strike down considerations of race in college admissions, a ruling that foreshadows what the Court is about to do to crucial protections against white legislatures’ proclivity to minimize Black representation. In Louisiana, for example, more than one-third of the population is Black, but without the enforced protections of the Voting Rights Act, the legislature drew distorted congressional maps that mathematically and definitively create five majority-white districts and just one majority-Black district. Aside from assuring disproportionate white representation, these maps also secure Mike Johnson’s seat and leadership in the House.

And just last year, Roberts and his fellow Republicans transgressed long-standing legal precedents against racial gerrymandering by allowing South Carolina Republicans to remove more than 20,000 Black voters from their traditional voting district, in order to give Rep. Nancy Mace a safe seat in the 1st District along the Gullah Geechee shore. The Roberts Court claimed, again despite detailed findings from lower court judges, that the (Republican) legislature could create a racially disparate effect in its maps if its stated goal was to limit Democratic representation by moving Black voters’ districts.

The issue of racially disparate effects is precisely what Roberts sought relentlessly to exclude from Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as he launched his legal and political career.

As I detail in my new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights:

After choosing to be a kind of paid stagiaire to [William Rehnquist] the most regressive justice on the Supreme Court, John Roberts got the nod for a job at the very top of the Department of Justice to work as a special assistant to Attorney General of the United States William French Smith. Justice Rehnquist had called Ken Starr, Smith’s counsel, to recommend Roberts for a post in the leadership of the Justice Department. Smith and Starr hired Roberts and put him in charge of the Voting Rights Act reauthorization issues. Roberts had no actual experience working on voting rights, and his only seeming ‘qualification’ for the job was clerking for Rehnquist, who was a prominent opponent of voting rights.

From his new vantage point in the executive branch, Roberts seemed determined to do everything he could to preserve his judicial mentor’s ruling in Bolden and block Congress from amending the Voting Rights Act to nullify the judicially concocted discriminatory intent requirement that ignored disparate impacts on Black Americans. According to his close colleague Michael Carvin, Roberts was working sixty-five plus hours a week— writing arguments, developing talking points, and drafting op- eds on the Voting Rights Act. Such was his single-minded devotion to blocking Congress from restoring that law and his determination to exclude the effects on Black voters as proof of a violation.

If you think Roberts is going to do the right thing now–as Donald Trump pushes Texas and North Carolina to rig their maps to protect him from losing control of Congress–think again. That’s another reason why, in my opinion, the passage of Proposition 50 in California is so vital to help counter Republican efforts to block genuine majority rule in Congress.

And, remember, Roberts orchestrated the decisions that paved the way for Trump’s return to power with his unprecedented and counter-constitutional ruling giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution last year. Then there’s the spate of shadow docket rulings Roberts has not dissented from, mowing down lower court orders that found Trump’s policy dictates are causing irreparable harm and are likely in violation of the Constitution or statutes or legal precedents or all three.

And let’s not forget that in 2013, Roberts struck down another key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing waves of voter restrictions across the country. His dictate disregarded a mountain of congressional fact-findings on the need for preclearance to prevent precisely the democracy-destabilizing outcome he made possible through his arrogant use of the judicial office to impose his political agenda as binding law in spite of the will of our elected representatives.

John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He has become what I am calling a “Trumpire,” rewriting the law in ways that aid Trump and restrict our rights in alignment with the right-wing political agenda he whole-heartedly embraced as a pre-MAGA Reagan revolutionary. It’s a MAGA Court now and he is at the helm, acting in some ways more powerfully than a king, as the king-maker.

We are going to need new language to address what is about to become of the “rule of law” as it diverges dramatically from the rule of justice in voting rights and much, much more. And we are going to need to organize, like the No Kings march times ten!

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What I’m Reading:

• My book – this week marks my book tour, starting in Oakland and hopefully coming to a city near you soon!

• How to plug into No Kings Day marches for our freedoms!

• And, the Constitution.

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Few people noticed that in the counter-constitutional ruling Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated 17 months ago giving Donald Trump unprecedented immunity to commit crimes as president, Roberts included language reinforcing the pardon power, which was not at issue in that case. But perhaps Trump noticed what Roberts did for him in trying to clear the field of any potential constraints on the pardon power and its abuse.

Roberts was taking it on himself – with the help of his fellow Republican appointees, half of whom were installed by the 45th president – to effectively pardon Trump for trying to subvert the 2020 election. That ruling paved the way for Trump’s return to power by blocking a federal trial on the crimes he was charged with. Why not use that destructive, partisan edict to muffle other potential challenges to Trump’s invented omnipotence?

That’s exactly what Roberts appeared to do by emphasizing the notion that a president has powers to pardon – and to fire executive branch employees – that are absolutely beyond any checks and balances, except for impeachment.

Did the Framers of the Constitution really mean to allow a president to pardon someone who recently enriched him or to allow pardons based on bribery or similar influences?

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Take Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhou (CZ), a crypto billionaire who had been fined $50 million – and whose company, Binance, just so happened to have helped the Trump family’s new World Liberty crypto enterprise by facilitating a $2 billion purchase of its “stablecoin.” Surely Trump wiping away CZ’s criminal consequences warrants revisiting the claim that Congress can place no limits on what looks like a kind of reward. Don’t worry: Trump said he had no idea who CZ even is. Trust us, this is not corrupt at all….

Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States pumps up the pardon power by trying to reinforce it as limitless. Roberts did so knowing Trump had already used the power in disreputable ways in his first term, starting with his first pardon of Joe Arpaio who literally defied court orders–as if that was not a tell of where things were heading. Trump also pardoned people who committed war crimes, and he even used some of the murderous war criminals he pardoned to raise money for his 2020 re-election campaign. (Last month, as I noted, Roberts attended a screening of Nuremberg where the words of the U.S. prosecutor of Nazi war crimes rang out: “We are able to do away with domestic tyranny … only when we make all men answerable to law.”)

In decreeing Trump immune from criminal prosecution for official acts, Roberts claimed “The President’s authority to pardon, in other words, is ‘conclusive and preclusive,’ ‘disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject,’” citing that language from the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. But Youngstown was not about the pardon power at all. It was about the power of a president to seize steel mills to prevent the disruption of materials to aid the military in the Korean War. And the Court rejected President Harry Truman’s assertion of that power. Youngstown does not mention pardons. Not once. But Roberts chose to borrow language from the ruling to try to cement pardons as being utterly beyond legal review or legislation.

The few prior Supreme Court rulings on pardons are worth re-examining. The Burdick case from 1915 was about whether a person could refuse a presidential pardon. In that case, President Woodrow Wilson was trying to use the pardon power to force an editor to reveal the sources of a story about fraud by denying him the power to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself; the editor refused to testify and was held in contempt. In Burdick, the Court focused only on the “narrow question” of whether a pardon had to be accepted to be effective or enforceable. It ruled that a pardon could be rejected. It did not hold the pardon power to be beyond any legislative rules.

Another case, Ex parte Garland, addressed whether Congress could impose a loyalty oath disbarring attorneys who aided the Confederacy even if they had been pardoned. In that 1867 case, the Court ruled that Congress could not impose that condition on someone President Andrew Johnson had pardoned after the Civil War. That case did include language asserting that the pardon power is “unlimited,” can apply to any federal offense, and is “not subject to legislative control,” but why should that interpretation protecting insurrectionists bind us now in the face of what is unfolding? After all, that Court described the pardon as a president’s “benign prerogative of mercy.”

Why should we be bound by such an interpretation when the pardon power is not being dispensed as a “benign prerogative of mercy” but rather as a malignant act of caprice or worse? If the Roberts Court can claim to find immunity in Article II of the Constitution – where there is none – then why can we not argue that there must be some similarly invisible constraints on pardons being deployed in ways that are deeply destructive of equal justice and common sense, or amount to self-dealing for personal gain or bribery?

The rationale for vesting in the president the power to issue a pardon, rather than Congress, is grounded by the Federalist Papers in the notion that the president would be a person of good character: “As the sense of responsibility is always strongest, in proportion as it is undivided, it may be inferred that a single man would be most ready to attend to the force of those motives which might plead for a mitigation of the rigor of the law, and least apt to yield to considerations which were calculated to shelter a fit object of its vengeance. The reflection that the fate of a fellow-creature depended on his sole fiat, would naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution; the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget equal circumspection, though of a different kind.”

That does not describe the 47th president at all.

What happens when the “benign power to mitigate against injustice” is wielded to shield from any accountability the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of flooding the United States with 400 tons of cocaine? Trump issued this pardon the same week it was revealed that his administration murdered two boat crew members who had survived an initial attack off the coast of Venezuela – an action many have called a war crime. Trump and his advisers are claiming an inherent right to summarily execute men not even charged with the drug trafficking crimes Hernandez was convicted of committing, under the guise of a war that Congress has not declared. And it comes as Trump has assailed Members of Congress for standing up against illegal orders to servicemembers, calling for six legislators to be hanged for sedition.

That pardon comes on the heels of Trump pardoning David Gentile, a billionaire who bilked investors in a $1.6 billion scheme and who ruined the financial futures of countless Americans. Now he doesn’t have to pay any of them millions in restitution.

And the list goes on and on of corrupt people Trump has released from prison and back into our communities. That list includes those rightly convicted of violently attacking Capitol Police to help him try to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results.

Why should we tolerate Trump’s rampant manipulation and desecration of the law?

Why shouldn’t a bill of impeachment for Trump include his abuses of the pardon power? It should be added to numerous other transgressions of the laws that he is charged with faithfully executing, like how he has blocked money Congress appropriated to fund scientific research and mitigate poverty, instead used our nation’s wealth and power to benefit foreign leaders who kiss up to him, even to the detriment of American families.

Before John Roberts did it for him by inventing broad presidential immunity, Trump audaciously claimed a right to pardon himself. And now he is flouting the Constitution’s term limits for presidents by selling 2028 hats while his close allies float a plainly illegal third term and he raises campaign cash. Meanwhile, Trump has claimed that President Joe Biden’s pardons are invalid if they were signed by autopen, even though a statute expressly recognizes the validity of autopenning, which Trump himself has also used.

Why should we not regard the Roberts Court’s Trump-serving declarations as anything more than the exercises of raw, partisan political power by operatives in black robes?

Reining in the pardon power may seem like a long shot, but why not make the case for reforming it along with everything else that needs reform to help make our democracy actually work for We the People of the 21st century?

We should be questioning the old assumptions, too – thinking broadly and dreaming boldly about what needs to change for our society to thrive, and not just the billionaires backing Trump or currying his favor. To really make America great, we cannot be afraid to call out corruption, including the corruption and mayhem of the pardons under Trump, along with any other prior misuses of that power, so it can never be so abused again.

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What I’m Reading:

• The transcript of the You Might Be Right podcast “Has Pardon Power Gone Too Far?”

  • You can also listen to the episode where former Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam discuss pardons with Steve Vladeck and Mike Nelson, including potential reforms.

• The chapter on presidential power in my new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

  • My publisher, Bold Type Books, is offering a holiday discount of 20% off on my book. I guarantee you will learn something new in every chapter!

And, of course, the Constitution.

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“We are able to do away with domestic tyranny … only when we make all men answerable to law.”

–Chief Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson

This past weekend Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife attended a screening of the new film “Nuremberg,” about the trials of Nazi leaders and soldiers for war crimes. It must have been awkward – for some in that audience – when the actor Michael Shannon recited part of American prosecutor (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson’s opening statement about the rule of law at the trial of Hermann Göring.

But that is precisely what Roberts severed from our Constitution when he orchestrated the counter-constitutional pronouncement 17 months ago giving Donald Trump immunity and paving the way for his return to power.

It was Roberts and the recklessly partisan majority of Republican appointees on the Court he leads who made the shocking announcement that Trump was immune from criminal prosecution after he was indicted for his actions around trying to subvert the election after he incited the January 6 insurrection – a rebellion against the government, otherwise known as “sedition,” though he was not charged with that crime. The four charges included conspiring to defraud the United States and conspiring against our civil rights. Roberts’s unprecedented edict invented immunity for Trump after he unleashed a violent crowd on the Capitol determined to stop Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the results of the 2020 election, by asserting among other things: “If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore!”

The bloody and deadly events that day did not succeed, despite acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller–at Trump’s request–ordering the National Guard not to be armed with batons, helmets, or body armor, and in spite of Miller holding them back from aiding the Capitol Police for hours that day. As noted by the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Miller “did not approve an operational plan to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol until 4:32 p.m., more than three hours after he first learned that demonstrators had breached the Capitol perimeter. The National Guard did not arrive at the Capitol for another hour, at nearly 5:30.”

It is impossible to read history and not hear it rhyme with the notorious Beer Hall Putsch that happened almost 100 years before Trump’s failed coup.

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But that’s not all: The Roberts Six have propped up its keystone declaration that Trump has immunity with a series of other rulings that are creating a gateway for authoritarianism to barrel into the United States. Since January, Roberts and his Republican cohorts have issued 24 extraordinary orders mowing down trial court rulings that sought to protect people in the United States from irreparable harm caused by Trump’s unilateral dictates.

That deliberate and aggressive intervention by Roberts and his fraternal party-line quintuplets on the nation’s highest court has further emboldened Trump. He has unleashed his version of secretive state police (what could be called “Geheimnisvoll Staatspolizei” or “gev-stapo” instead of the secret original “geheimnis” ones, which was shortened to “gestapo”). It is now common for his agents, with guns, to accost people while hiding their faces, their names, and their units – with no probable cause of any crimes.

Where are we on the timeline? The good news, relatively, is that it’s more like 1933 than 1938, but that’s not great. However, we are pre-Holocaust and we are, at this moment, pre-invasion of other nations. The future is yet unwritten, and We the People still have the power to help write our destiny.

But it is worth acknowledging that, as the publishers of “The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice” detailed:

“While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. … [I]ntelligent and well-educated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination…. [T]heir support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic self delusion….”

As Michael Luttig told me in a recent interview on Legal AF, the emergency docket rulings of the Roberts Court this year are “illegitimate.” Between those actions and Trump’s we are seeing a growing divergence of law from justice, after years of progress to draw these two values closer together.

The most troubling recent example of this divergence is Trump asserting six Democratic members of Congress should be “hanged” for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” because they appeared in a video stating that the military cannot follow illegal orders. Actually, federal law (18 U.S.C. section 115) makes it a crime to threaten a federal official with murder for doing their job, which includes protecting the U.S. Constitution. If a regular American – who was not given immunity for so-called “official acts” or words by Roberts – did such a thing, the Secret Service would investigate them and they could face up to 10 years in jail.

One of the main takeaways from the Nuremberg trials is, in fact, that soldiers cannot take plainly illegal action with impunity by claiming they were just following orders. The Nuremberg charter, which the United States co-authored, specified that “the fact that a defendant acted pursuant to an order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility.”

The Code of Military Justice reflects that principle, too, along with its corollary, which is that a soldier can be court-martialed for refusing to follow a lawful order. This tenet is not new: In America it dates back to at least the War of 1812, when circuit judge George Washington (our first president’s nephew) found that “No military or civil officer can condemn an inferior to violate the laws of his country; nor will such command excuse, much less justify the act.”

The fact that our military does not take a loyalty oath to a person but pledges to defend our Constitution is not just emblazoned on a plaque at West Point, a photo of which Trump unironically posted: “Our American code of military obedience requires that should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law.” It’s the law of the land.

This should be uncontroversial, but Trump’s FBI has opened an “inquiry” into the six lawmakers, and Pete Hegseth’s agents are probing Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a decorated combat veteran, for potential court-martial. This all calls to mind Montesquieu, whose writings about law and power profoundly influenced the framers of the Constitution and who wrote that: “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”

As I noted in my book, Without Precedent, “Whatever extremes Trump pursues in 2025 and beyond, these sins must fall at Roberts’s feet too. Roberts broke the central pillar upon which our Constitution is built: The American president is not a king.” He is not to be a dictator, either.

But all is not lost. We still have the power to make our voices heard.

This Thanksgiving week and beyond, I am so grateful for the tremendous efforts in state after state to get out the vote earlier this month, and to use the ballot to take a stand against the extremes we are seeing. The No Kings marches, with their peaceful solidarity and love for the ideals of our nation, bring me enormous hope–along with the often humorous and joyful community actions outside detention facilities. And, I am awed by the thousands of individual acts of courage in speaking up or recording injustices, along with the countless beautiful acts of neighbors helping neighbors. Plus, the power of organic economic boycotts, like the successful outcry against Disney over firing Jimmy Kimmel, has been so inspiring.

We have a lot of work to do together in the months ahead to broaden our connections with one another, make our communities more resilient, and help make our nation a better and more just place. Together, we really can help bend the arc of history toward justice and freedom and fairness, if only we do not give up. Hope is a choice we must renew every day. Every. Single. Day.

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What I’m Reading:

Actually, this week I am focusing less on reading and more on the music that makes my heart sing, including:

• Splendid jazz riffs from Bruce Henry, who I just saw in concert, on songs like this, “In the Beginning God,” ““House of the Rising Sun,” and ”Song for My Father”

• The amazing Dezy Walls’s original music, such as “Don’t Hide Your Love,” “It Never Rains in Ireland,” and “Love Is”

• I admit it: I’m a Swifty. Whenever I need to shake off something irritating I play this song: “Shake It Off.”

And, I love funny songs. This quirky, animated one sung by Jemaine Clement and Kristin Chenoweth is one of my favorites (although I love the original version, too): “I Will Survive.”

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Americans across the nation celebrated this week when the Roberts Court rejected a petition filed by Kim Davis, the infamous Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage certificates to David Ermold and David Moore, and other gay couples. She had asked the nation’s highest court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognizes the “fundamental right to marry” for same-sex couples. In an unsigned order, the Court declined to take this challenge up… for now.

I’m relieved, too, because the freedom to marry the person you love and who loves you back is one of the most important and meaningful blessings of liberty one can enjoy in the pursuit of happiness. And, no one should be able to use their public office, as a county clerk or in any other role, to impose their personal religious beliefs on you.

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We must pause and celebrate the moments when freedom prevails, especially in these difficult days of a corrupt presidential administration, a despoiled Congress, and a captured high court stocked with hand-picked partisan operatives wielding the judicial power to recklessly unleash Donald Trump from the bounds of law.

We can exhale, for now. The lower court was right to find that Davis violated the civil rights of Ermold and Moore, and the jury was right to award damages of $100,000 plus attorneys fees. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was right to uphold that verdict in a unanimous ruling by three judges who were appointed by Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden. And the Roberts Court was right to uphold those rulings.

But….

We are not out of the woods.

In fact, we are deep in the forest on a long, dark night, and marriage equality still remains at real risk.

Davis’s lawyers at a litigation group that calls itself “Liberty Counsel” have quite a history. They have assailed marriage equality, defended the torturous practice of conversion therapy and, among other things, tried to subject women of the 21st century to 19th century abortion bans. The group, which has had close ties to anti-gay televangelist Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Liberty University, has been designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Their brief to the Court opened with citing Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell, along with the dissent by Clarence Thomas. The latter recently opined that the Court should just reverse any legal precedent he/they dislike, and urged that Obergefell be reversed in his concurrence in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade.

Davis’s lawyers clearly believed they had the numbers to reverse Obergefell. That landmark and compelling 5-4 ruling was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2015, with Roberts, Thomas, Alito (and Scalia) opposing gay marriage. That was before anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion operative Leonard Leo and his billionaire backers helped steal two vacant seats on the Supreme Court and install Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to get a 6-3 majority. It is fair to say Leo now has the votes to get his personal beliefs imposed as law by the Roberts Court, but the real question here is timing.

Roberts has shown just how patient and calculating he can be, and “jolting” Americans who support marriage equality into action before the midterms would not be politically prudent. He is already setting the table to aid Trump and Republicans in pre-rigging the midterms by signaling that the Republican appointees are prepared to strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which, as I detail in my new book, Roberts cut his teeth targeting as a Reagan revolutionary.

The Court has discretion to decide when it will take up and then take down Obergefell. Will it be in 2027? 2029? To me, the only question is when, not if.

A Call to Action

If you’re an American who loves freedom, the time to begin organizing is now. We can’t just wait around and keep hoping the Roberts Court will do the right thing. We need to take proactive steps for ballot measures and other actions–like repealing any criminalization laws still on the books targeting LGBTQ Americans.

After the Dobbs ruling, the unprecedented creation of presidential immunity, and the two dozen cases this year where the Roberts six blocked lower courts from well-founded restraining orders, the mask has fallen. The arrogant Roberts Court is on a path of destruction. We cannot afford to be caught flat-footed, as many were after Dobbs, when ancient bans on abortion sprang back to life like zombies we had to suddenly battle all over again.

We the People must secure our rights in every state because we can no longer count on the nation’s highest court to protect our freedoms.

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What I’m Reading:

• The briefs in this case, especially the brief submitted by the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), which is worth reading in full.

• The Declaration of Independence, with the 250th anniversary coming up soon.

• My book, which includes a detailed discussion of John Roberts’ hostility toward marriage equality. Here is a brief excerpt:

“The widely respected conservative Judge Richard Posner called John Roberts’s objections in Obergefell “heartless” and utterly dismantled Roberts’s dissent. Posner observed,

Gratuitous interference in other people’s lives is bigotry. The fact that it is often religiously motivated does not make it less so. The United States is not a theocracy, and religious disapproval of harmless practices is not a proper basis for prohibiting such practices, especially if the practices are highly valued by their practitioners….

Posner also took aim at Roberts’s posturing as a historian:

The chief justice criticizes the majority for “order[ing] the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?” We’re pretty sure we’re not any of the above….

The Carthaginians, by the way, also ritually sacrificed their children to the gods. Some San nomads have required that women be segregated when menstruating. And several Han Chinese emperors were bisexual or had male lovers. But, to Posner’s point, why should any of those examples be persuasive or binding on civil society in America, on the nontheocratic rules for a modern democracy contending with the meaning of liberty for its diversity of people?

The Roberts Court is enthralled with its power to impose the majority’s religious views on all Americans, without regard to our legal precedents.”

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This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the part of that landmark legislation John Roberts spent hundreds of hours trying to limit when he launched his legal career. Few people know that because most coverage of this litigation does not mention it.

Just three years ago, Roberts signaled that the long-standing legal precedents that allowed Black Americans to challenge the dilution of their votes were in trouble. They were “controversial,” he said, but still binding law for now. In that case, the other five Republican appointees to the Court allowed maps drawn in Alabama – maps that three lower court judges found to be illegal under the Voting Rights Act – to be used in the 2022 midterm elections. They claimed it was too close to the election to redraw the maps to comply with Section 2. That decision was issued the first week of February and paved the way for similar maps drawn by Republican legislatures that diluted Black voting power to be used in Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida.

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The result? Republicans took control of Congress, with four seats more than the 218 they needed. It was not the “red wave” Republicans had been hyping, and Mike Johnson would not have become Speaker of the House without the Roberts Court’s intervention. That election put an end to any further investigations into the violent insurrection Trump incited on January 6 and also allowed Republicans to block Biden’s legislative agenda.

After those midterms, Roberts took his pen to strike down considerations of race in college admissions, a ruling that foreshadows what the Court is about to do to crucial protections against white legislatures’ proclivity to minimize Black representation. In Louisiana, for example, more than one-third of the population is Black, but without the enforced protections of the Voting Rights Act, the legislature drew distorted congressional maps that mathematically and definitively create five majority-white districts and just one majority-Black district. Aside from assuring disproportionate white representation, these maps also secure Mike Johnson’s seat and leadership in the House.

And just last year, Roberts and his fellow Republicans transgressed long-standing legal precedents against racial gerrymandering by allowing South Carolina Republicans to remove more than 20,000 Black voters from their traditional voting district, in order to give Rep. Nancy Mace a safe seat in the 1st District along the Gullah Geechee shore. The Roberts Court claimed, again despite detailed findings from lower court judges, that the (Republican) legislature could create a racially disparate effect in its maps if its stated goal was to limit Democratic representation by moving Black voters’ districts.

The issue of racially disparate effects is precisely what Roberts sought relentlessly to exclude from Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as he launched his legal and political career.

As I detail in my new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights:

After choosing to be a kind of paid stagiaire to [William Rehnquist] the most regressive justice on the Supreme Court, John Roberts got the nod for a job at the very top of the Department of Justice to work as a special assistant to Attorney General of the United States William French Smith. Justice Rehnquist had called Ken Starr, Smith’s counsel, to recommend Roberts for a post in the leadership of the Justice Department. Smith and Starr hired Roberts and put him in charge of the Voting Rights Act reauthorization issues. Roberts had no actual experience working on voting rights, and his only seeming ‘qualification’ for the job was clerking for Rehnquist, who was a prominent opponent of voting rights.

From his new vantage point in the executive branch, Roberts seemed determined to do everything he could to preserve his judicial mentor’s ruling in Bolden and block Congress from amending the Voting Rights Act to nullify the judicially concocted discriminatory intent requirement that ignored disparate impacts on Black Americans. According to his close colleague Michael Carvin, Roberts was working sixty-five plus hours a week— writing arguments, developing talking points, and drafting op- eds on the Voting Rights Act. Such was his single-minded devotion to blocking Congress from restoring that law and his determination to exclude the effects on Black voters as proof of a violation.

If you think Roberts is going to do the right thing now–as Donald Trump pushes Texas and North Carolina to rig their maps to protect him from losing control of Congress–think again. That’s another reason why, in my opinion, the passage of Proposition 50 in California is so vital to help counter Republican efforts to block genuine majority rule in Congress.

And, remember, Roberts orchestrated the decisions that paved the way for Trump’s return to power with his unprecedented and counter-constitutional ruling giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution last year. Then there’s the spate of shadow docket rulings Roberts has not dissented from, mowing down lower court orders that found Trump’s policy dictates are causing irreparable harm and are likely in violation of the Constitution or statutes or legal precedents or all three.

And let’s not forget that in 2013, Roberts struck down another key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing waves of voter restrictions across the country. His dictate disregarded a mountain of congressional fact-findings on the need for preclearance to prevent precisely the democracy-destabilizing outcome he made possible through his arrogant use of the judicial office to impose his political agenda as binding law in spite of the will of our elected representatives.

John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He has become what I am calling a “Trumpire,” rewriting the law in ways that aid Trump and restrict our rights in alignment with the right-wing political agenda he whole-heartedly embraced as a pre-MAGA Reagan revolutionary. It’s a MAGA Court now and he is at the helm, acting in some ways more powerfully than a king, as the king-maker.

We are going to need new language to address what is about to become of the “rule of law” as it diverges dramatically from the rule of justice in voting rights and much, much more. And we are going to need to organize, like the No Kings march times ten!

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What I’m Reading:

• My book – this week marks my book tour, starting in Oakland and hopefully coming to a city near you soon!

• How to plug into No Kings Day marches for our freedoms!

• And, the Constitution.

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We are in the midst of an unprecedented set of constitutional crises. Of course Donald Trump’s belligerent and erratic orders–and his appalling musings–are shaking the foundations of our nation, but it is the U.S. Supreme Court with John Roberts at the helm that is recklessly and aggressively emboldening him. In this nightmarish scenario, the call is coming from inside the house. The Court that is supposed to be a guard against the erosion of the law is rewriting the law–largely in the dark–to allow Trump to take actions that were forbidden to his predecessors.

I had a debate the other day with someone asserting it would only be a constitutional crisis if Trump defied the Court. I replied: that would also be a constitutional crisis (and it’s also already under way, just ask Kilmar Abrego Garcia).

But it would also be a constitutional crisis for the Court to revise or obliterate Trump’s legal obligations until the rules he dislikes are no longer there to defy, which is also well underway.

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The truth of the matter is that six lawyers in black robes, three of whom Trump appointed, seem to be buying time to spool out rationales for voiding legal obligations that once bound every president. Even if they had more benevolent motivations than accomplishing key prongs of the Leonard Leo-backed Project 2025 wish list and its antecedents–such as purporting to pacify Trump to prevent another kind of constitutional crisis caused by his defiance–the cost is simply too steep. Preventing Trump from defying a court order by allowing him to do whatever he wants makes for no real rules at all, for him to the detriment of We the People and the American Constitution. It’s a hefty price to pay for the pretense that the rule of law is safe as it is hollowed out before our eyes–by this constitutionally temporary administration and the Roberts Court.

If it feels like we are trapped in a live action sequel to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, that seems about right. One character in that novel remarked: “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” This administration–this seven-day-a-week chaos machine–is the worst unscripted TV show I’ve ever seen. Worse, it is playing out across multiple channels multiple times every day and IRL. And we are paying for its expenses in every sense.

America is unmoored, not just because of right-wing propaganda fueling Trump’s distortion of facts and big tech billionaires profiting off of hate for “the other,” the scapegoats Trump names. The fever being stoked could be contained by the law in significant ways if only we had people of principle on the nation’s highest court–like Judge Michael Luttig, a noted conservative named to the Fourth Circuit by the first President Bush–who would put our Constitution above their party. But instead we have John Roberts–whose methods for beating out Luttig for the Supreme Court–and more–I describe in my new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have used the Court to aid Trump while failing, repeatedly, to protect core principles, long-standing legal precedents, and baseline procedures that other judges have been faithfully following to try to protect against irreparable harm to people, science, and more. The most substantial breach occurred 15 months ago, when Roberts wrecked the vital tenet anchoring our nation to the bedrock of our founding: that no one is above the law.

As I was preparing to write my new book last summer, Roberts orchestrated that singularly destructive ruling that wiped away the serious crimes Trump was charged with, paving the way for his return to the White House. I had feared the ruling in Trump v. United States would unleash the former president from the restraints of the law that had largely held during his first term, the period before the full effect of his three additions to the Court were felt. And I was right. The GOP rewarding John Roberts with a 6-3 supermajority on the nation’s highest court means in reality that there is no longer a swing vote to block extreme partisan edicts, such as the invention of immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump, retroactively and prospectively.

John Roberts was the first beneficiary of the Federalist Society-spawned “No More Souters” campaign. David Souter’s offense? The audacity to follow landmark legal precedents as a Supreme Court justice. Roberts was also the first justice confirmed through the scheme to pack the Court with not-Souters, that is, with political operatives. He was the first beneficiary of the dark money apparatus to capture the nation’s highest court in order to roll back legal precedents and laws disliked by regressive billionaires and the groups and political apparatchik they fund.

As I detail in my book, Roberts has embraced the wish list of the hard core elites in the Reagan Revolution from the outset of his career–he was one of them from the start. He has used his perch at the helm of the Supreme Court to deliver win after win for the right-wing gameplan with few exceptions. Those who cling to the myth that Roberts is an institutionalist seriously mistake the institution to which he is most devoted: it’s the presidency, but only when it’s a Republican, even one acting like an American-born caesar and threatening to stay in power indefinitely.

When Joe Biden was president, the Roberts Court was busy hamstringing modest student loan debt relief during the COVID emergency and inventing huge new obstacles to executive branch actions on climate change–most notably the “major questions doctrine” which Roberts and his clique claimed required Congress to weigh in first despite the EPA’s mandates. Yet, with Trump unilaterally usurping Congress’ power of the purse and trade despite the express language of the Constitution, and more, that same Court faction has conveniently forgotten that “doctrine” and its supposed devotion to judicial restraint by rapidly allowing him to ram full speed ahead.

Roberts has aggrandized the Supreme Court as the decider of all things, even to the point of freeing the executive branch from its origins as the executor of the laws passed by Congress, not the originator of laws under the Constitution–and not above the law, like a king. During the hearings on his nomination, Roberts promised the American people he would adhere to the fundamental principle that “no one is above the law” but, as we can see, when it mattered most, he broke that promise. He knowingly broke that pledge to aid Trump–an act that not only effectively pardoned Trump but even seemed to reach back in time to exonerate Dick Nixon.

Once upon a time in America, Republicans and Democrats agreed that Nixon was a crook who had abused the Department of Justice through his dictates to fire Archibald Cox and protect himself from being held accountable for breaking the law. Now, in MAGA America, the GOP openly embraces Trump’s staffing of DOJ with his former criminal defense attorneys and deploying them against his enemies. Meanwhile Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees to the Court bearhug outlier contentions like the “unified executive” theory to allow Trump to breach decades of legal precedent and practice to fire any exec branch employee at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

Much, much more than that is at stake and, in my view, the wreckage piling up must be laid at Roberts’ feet. The Reagan revolutionary atop the Supreme Court is responsible, along with his fellow partisans, for turning Trump’s transgressions of the Constitution, statutes, rules, and precedents into the law of the land, as if they were alchemizing coal into gold. I’ve heard about this inverted golden rule before: he with the gold rules. The version of the rule of law under Roberts is rapidly diverging from what is morally just or constitutionally sound. As the protagonist in Heller’s novel realized: Catch-22 is not real but because the people in power claim it is, it has real effects–however, because it is not really real it cannot be readily repealed.

Still, we cannot give up. We have to choose hope and work together to reform the Court and restore our freedoms–and help make America a land of liberty and infused with the equal protection of the law, for real. As my work partner, the amazing Alex Aronson, regularly notes, Abraham Lincoln was right when he said: “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” The future is still ours to make in our democratic republic–if we do not give up and give in.

What I’m Reading:

• My book, of course, now that it is in print. I hope you will read it, too!

• Court Accountability’s Judicial Threat Tracker on the MAGA cases moving through the courts, which is prepared by the super-talented Mike Sacks, along with Alex and the team.

• My copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, again.

• The Constitution, still.

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It’s hard to believe this is where America is on the timeline, but it’s not hard to imagine it getting even worse with a chief executive fanning the flames. If only there were truth in advertising, the red hats would bear the hashtag #MAWA and the U.S. Supreme Court would be called the judicial junta that it has become–an unelected judicial council that is blessing Donald Trump’s counter-legal dictates. Those dictates are links in the chains of authoritarianism, forged through the destruction of civil liberties and the perversion of the rule of law to serve one man–and the delusional billionaire oligarchs backing him.

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Almost every week in the cacophony that characterizes Trump’s administration, there comes another ruling on his side from the Republicans installed on the nation’s highest court, through what’s known as the “shadow docket.” It’s called that because these are edicts issued without a public oral argument or full briefing, but it has become even shadowier in Trump 2.0. It is being used as a vehicle to reverse well-reasoned lower court rulings temporarily blocking some of the Trump regime’s most extreme actions. The Supreme Court’s stygian orders–often reversing trial court rulings based on legal precedents without issuing any opinion to rationalize such reversals–have left lower court judges without guidance on what they did wrong, other than not bowing to Trump.

Earlier this month, in a rare move, a dozen federal court judges spoke off the record with the press about their concerns regarding this pattern. As NBC described it:

Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals… And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation. Emergency rulings used to be rare. But their number has dramatically increased in recent years.

After Neil Gorsuch–the lifelong Republican activist whom Leonard Leo urged Trump to install after orchestrating the theft of that vacancy with Sen. Mitch McConnell– lectured lower court judges that they should not “defy” the Supreme Court, a lower court judge noted that the shadow docket rulings often do not give reasons for reversals. U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs noted that it is “unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for ‘defy[ing]’ the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

In response perhaps, the Roberts Court gave some explanation recently when it used the shadow docket to reverse an order from a federal court in Los Angeles that had blocked Trump’s ICE agents from using racial profiling in their raids. As the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) explained:

The order barred immigration agents from stopping people based solely on their race, language, job or location. Judge [Maame] Frimpong made the decision after several U.S. citizens were detained by ICE agents. One of those U.S. citizens detained was Job Garcia, a Los Angeles resident who was held for more than 24 hours after agents violently arrested him at a Home Depot where he was making a delivery.

Brett Kavanaugh–a Republican operative similarly installed on the Court by Trump at Leo’s urging and someone whose impeachment I was the first to call for–issued a concurrence in the reversal of that order that revealed just how flawed the Court’s reasoning is. As MALDEF compellingly wrote:

First, his opinion rests on crude and unsupported assumptions and stereotypes about the undocumented; no stay of an order requiring compliance with the Constitution should rest on such a lack of evidence. Second, he completely disregards the consequential, demographic fact that millions of citizens and lawful residents of the Los Angeles community are also Latino and also speak Spanish. In effect, Kavanaugh sacrifices the rights of all Latinos to the false Trumpist idol of unconstrained immigration enforcement. Third, he ignores other demonstrated and critical context – like the fact that many of those detaining and questioning folks were in unmarked vehicles, masked, and in civilian clothes. That is a relevant consideration as to how these activities – including racial and language stereotyping — are occurring in a lawless and dangerous manner… [T]oday’s decision will catalyze activity that will lead to widespread violations of clear constitutional rights, including the ban on undue force.

Twenty-percent of the American population is Hispanic or Latino; allowing masked federal agents to engage in racial profiling puts nearly 70 million people here at risk of being accosted and having their rights violated. The figure is even higher when you consider people who may simply look Latino.

Back when Brett Kavanaugh was in the White House receiving confidential memos taken without permission from me when I was the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee, the man secretly providing Kavanaugh with those memos seemed obsessed with my ethnicity. He was a former staffer for Sen. Orrin Hatch who had catapulted over his supervisors to become the nominations advisor to the new Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, perhaps using my memos as his currency.

As the Republicans confirmed John Roberts over our objections and as we prepared to filibuster Miguel Estrada’s nomination, Frist’s staffer began tracking me down to slyly try to figure out if I was Latina–he’d sidle up to me in the Senate cafeteria and ask if I spoke any foreign languages or if my family immigrated here, questions I dodged because I considered his interest insincere and odd. He even asked me if my last name was really pronounced “gra-vez” like Sanchez.

That was just days before the outside groups aiding Kavanaugh’s efforts to get Bush’s judicial nominees confirmed launched attack ads calling my boss, Sen. Patrick Leahy, “anti-Hispanic” for blocking Estrada. I think some were afraid that their attack ads could be refuted if Leahy’s chief counsel for nominations was a Latina. I’m not. (I tell more of the story about the files Kavanaugh received in my new book, Without Precedent.)

Under the new racial profiling ruling issued this month by the reckless Roberts Court, countless Americans are at risk of being harassed based on their appearance or surname or job, without any actual basis to believe they are not lawfully present in the United States. Since Trump’s election, I have started carrying my passport with me wherever I go, something I never considered necessary before.

I cannot believe America is now a place where masked federal agents can demand that you present your papers–and even imprison people after capriciously disregarding the “REAL ID” the government has required for air travel.

I cannot believe we have Trump’s defense attorney acting as Attorney General and claiming she will arrest Americans exercising their freedom of speech while presiding over the coddling of Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child sex trafficker.

I cannot believe we have a madman at the helm of our federal health agency making it harder for people who want the Covid-19 vaccine to get that medicine.

I cannot believe we have such an arrogant and out of control U.S. Supreme Court under John Roberts’ rule…well, that I can believe, but it’s worse than I imagined even after he orchestrated Trump’s unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution and paved the way for Trump’s return to power.

There are so many things I cannot believe that are happening, but I still believe it is possible for America to choose a different course, a better one that rejects MAWA.

What I’m Reading:

• Dolores Huerta: A Life in American History

  • This new biography of the heroic civil rights organizer is so inspiring, and this week marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Week.

• Amy Coney Barrett’s Listening to the Law

  • I’m reading this so you don’t have to listen to the law being distorted by the Trump appointee handpicked–by none other than Leonard Leo–to destroy women’s reproductive rights. I promise to write a piece or two about some of the amazing spin she put in this memoir, secured by a $2 million advance.

• The Constitution

  • Today, September 17, is Constitution Day, but the Trump defense lawyer cast as Attorney General is using her post to push restricting our freedom of speech in spite of the protections for dissent in our First Amendment.

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This week, Donald Trump issued a new piece of paper claiming to have the power to establish “specialized units” to “deal with public order” in American cities. The assertion, styled as an Executive Order, directs the former FOX paid commentator whom Trump has cast as the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to create a “quick reaction force” ready for “rapid nationwide deployment.”

This is a deeply dangerous declaration of power, and it is predicated on false claims about the crime rate in Washington, DC, and other cities. Reliable statistics show that crime is at a 30-year low in DC, and the crime rate in DC and other “blue” cities in blue states is lower than in many “red” state cities, despite what FOX News claims.

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The President of the United States does not constitutionally have the power to order the deployment of National Guard troops “nationwide” to arrest Americans under the pretense of policing state and local crime. At least not under the Constitution as written and enforced for more than two centuries. This, too, will be litigated and we will soon see if the Republican faction dominating the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts treats this breach of the constitutional division of powers as yet another opportunity to embolden Trump.

Just last week–after several rulings by the Roberts Court overturning temporary injunctions issued by lower courts–Trump declared at a White House meeting, surrounded by the Cabinet of misfits he has given parts to in this unscripted reality show: “I have the right to do anything I want. I’m the president of the United States.”

Thanks, John Roberts. As Ed Pilkington wrote in The Guardian last month, you’re the umpire who picked a side. Earlier this year, when Trump was hot under the collar over detailed rulings against him by independent judges following the legal precedents that constitute the rule of law, Roberts assured Trump there was no need to call for their impeachment because, in essence, they don’t have the final say. “[I]mpeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts stated, “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

And then Roberts used that appellate process– specifically the shadow docket–to deliver for Trump, who Roberts orchestrated unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for and helped sweep back into power. Under Roberts, the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have been aggressively overturning well-reasoned rulings of lower court judges who issued detailed findings that support temporary restraining orders blocking several of the Trump regime’s extreme actions regarding immigrants, civil servants, and more.

Not only that, but the number of times the Roberts Court has intervened to aid Trump over these past few months is also unprecedented. The way that the Republican faction of the Court has done so, through the shadow docket and without issuing detailed findings to justify these extraordinary reversals, is also unprecedented as the dissents have eloquently noted. Earlier this summer, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the Court’s rulings have created “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” No wonder Trump is flexing out loud that he can do whatever he wants, even deploy troops in our cities to purportedly arrest people who break state or local laws, even though cities have more than enough police, and not a single mayor or governor has asked for assistance from Trump or the Guard.

This week, another federal judge ruled against Trump, based on the foundational component of the division of power between the federal government and the states, in response to a suit over his use of the military in response to protests over ICE seizures in Los Angeles: “There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence… Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” The judge found no valid basis for Trump to order military deployment. That ruling is right on the law, but we’ll have to see how Roberts and his partisan allies on the Court attempt to mangle that too in further servitude to Trump.

Watching the absurd scenes of armored vehicles outside federal buildings in DC and National Guard troops rounding up impoverished people with no homes outside Union Station, just steps from the Capitol, I have wept for the city I used to call my home–and for our nation. I’m old enough to remember that just four years ago, Trump told the Acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, to disarm the DC National Guard as Trump was gathering his loyalists in DC to try to stop the vote against him from being counted.

As noted in the report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, the Defense Department sent a memo on January 4, 2021, ordering that “without the Acting Secretary’s ‘subsequent, personal authorization,’ the Guard would not be issued batons, helmets, or body armor; could not interact physically with protestors, except in self-defense; and that the Quick Reaction Force (QRF)—40 servicemembers staged in case of an emergency at Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, Maryland—could be deployed only as a last resort…” Then on January 6, as his fans violently attacked the Capitol after he told them to take action or “we would not have a country left,” Miller failed to respond quickly to calls for help from Congress and governors until later in the afternoon. Then it took an hour to get the Guard the equipment and rules of engagement they needed to help the Capitol police–only after Trump praised his followers as patriots and told them to leave, long after the Capitol was invaded and Capitol police were assaulted and grievously harmed. Trump later pardoned his followers who were duly convicted for such acts.

This is all by Trump’s design. When the citadel of our democracy and our duly elected representatives needed urgent help to respond to the rebellion he incited, the Guard was held back. But, now, when Trump needs a distraction from the ongoing scandal involving pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell and the Epstein files, the National Guard has been deployed–fully armed–to roam the streets of DC and possibly a city near you, too.

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What I’m reading:

• A Coffin for King Charles: The Trial and Execution of Charles I

  • I am hoping that history does not repeat itself in spawning a civil war in response to a lawless leader. As Goodreads summarizes: “King Charles I was his own worst enemy. Self-righteous, arrogant, and unscrupulous, he had a penchant for making bad decisions. His troubles began the moment he ascended the throne in 1625… Charles simultaneously alienated both his subjects and his Parliament, prompting a series of events that ultimately lead to civil war, his own death and the abolition of the English monarchy.” In 1649, King Charles I was found guilty of trying to "uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people," and then he was beheaded by order of the government.

• The Appendix to the House Select Committee Report on the DC National Guard Preparation for and Response to January 6th

  • This report details the orders that kept the Guard from being a “quick” reaction force on the day Trump attempted to stop the vote from being counted, in contrast to his Executive Order this week to create quick reaction forces he could order into cities at will, if it is allowed to stand.

• And, as always, our Constitution, which sets boundaries between federal and state powers that principled “federalists” or a Federalist Society true to its name would be actively defending in response to Trump’s actions and claims (but they are not). Where is Leonard Leo’s condemnation of the regime’s destructive acts, which the operatives he helped get installed on the Supreme Court are aiding?

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The Trump Team has still failed to release the Epstein files. They have, however, moved convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to the lowest security facility, a prison camp as we detailed in Part 1 last week. Rumors are flying that the Trump regime will release her if she aids in fueling a narrative that exonerates Trump and helps him escape this scandal, whether that narrative is true or merely convenient for both parties. Trump has denied wrongdoing, though his name, as we know, appears in the Epstein files multiple times.

Today, in Part 2, we’re going to review the crimes Maxwell was convicted of committing despite her denials. We’ll also take a closer look at the timeline of Trump’s ties to Epstein.

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4. Maxwell’s Crimes Were–and Remain–Very Serious: Trafficking Teen Girls for Sex

Just three years ago, in 2022, Maxwell was convicted of “conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor.” That verdict and her 20-year prison sentence were recently upheld on appeal.

As the government’s sentencing memo summarized:

“Ghislaine Maxwell played an instrumental role in the horrific sexual abuse of multiple young teenage girls. As part of a disturbing agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell identified, groomed, and abused multiple victims, while she enjoyed a life of extraordinary luxury and privilege. In her wake, Maxwell left her victims permanently scarred with emotional and psychological injuries. That damage can never be undone, but it can be accounted for in crafting a just sentence for Maxwell’s crimes.”

This is a woman who, as the career prosecutors noted, has demonstrated an “utter lack of remorse. Instead of showing even a hint of acceptance of responsibility, the defendant makes a desperate attempt to cast blame wherever else she can.“

During the Biden administration, the non-political federal prosecutors pursuing a just sentence for Maxwell for her crimes underscored that Maxwell lived a life of extreme luxury with Epstein and intentionally “made the choice to sexually exploit numerous underage girls. She made the choice to conspire with Epstein for years, working as partners in crime and causing devastating harm to vulnerable victims. She should be held accountable for her disturbing role in an extensive child exploitation scheme.”

But, now with Trump at the helm of the White House, interfering almost daily in the activities of the Justice Department in order to serve his personal interests and desires, DOJ is quite literally making Maxwell’s sentence easier. This is someone who was lawfully convicted of exploiting children. For years. With no remorse. It is monstrous for Trump and his lawyers to be aiding her in any way.

5. Given Trump’s Claims, the Relevant Timeline Is Very Important to Understand

To understand what’s at stake here, as Trump has sought in various ways to distance himself from Epstein and Maxwell, the real timeline is illuminating and damning, in my opinion.

1999: Trump launched Trump Model Management, which employed his future wife, Melania, as a model. (For more on the modeling firms founded by Trump, Epstein, Jean-Luc Brunel, and other associates, take a look at this investigation and this story.)

2000: For part of that year, Virginia Roberts Giuffre was employed at Mar-a-Lago, which she later testified was where Maxwell recruited her to service Epstein, along with other men, like Prince Andrew–though he denied it while also settling the case. Twenty five years later, Trump would go on to assert that he had a falling out with Epstein for “stealing” the 16-year old girl away from his spa. (Prior to her death earlier this year, Giuffre noted that Trump and Epstein were good friends, but that Trump did not flirt with her.)

2002: New York Magazine published a profile of Epstein, as part of which Trump called the financial whiz “a terrific guy,” while simultaneously acknowledging that he likes women “on the younger side.”

2005: Trump married Melania in January. Later that year, Trump told Howard Stern about one of the reasons he liked controlling beauty pageant companies: “I’ll go backstage before a show… and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. You know, they’re standing there with no clothes… and so I sort of get away with things like that.” Notably, his “comment echoed real allegations: Tasha Dixon, Miss Arizona USA 2001, said Trump ‘just came strolling right in’ while contestants were changing. Another contestant, Mariah Billado of Miss Teen USA, said he entered their dressing room too — when many girls were still minors.”

2006: In July, 16 months after a 14-year-old girl and her family reported to the Palm Beach County police that Epstein had molested her at his Palm Beach mansion, he was indicted. The FBI also opened an investigation into how many girls he may have victimized.

2007: Epstein’s attorneys tried to secure a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, a George W. Bush nominee. In September, Acosta cut an outrageous deal, which required Epstein to plead guilty to a state charge of solicitation of prostitution instead of facing more serious charges related to the 14-year old girl and other children. Notably, October 2007 is the last time reporters observe that Epstein is listed on records at Mar-a-Lago, where he was listed as “Account closed 10/07”...

2008: In October, after additional wrangling, Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation, was sentenced to “house” arrest at his Palm Beach mansion, and registered as a sex offender.

2019: After Epstein was indicted by federal prosecutors, Trump claimed to reporters: “I had a falling out a long time ago, I’d say maybe 15 years,” which would have been mid-2004, and yet there are photos of Epstein and Maxwell at Trump’s wedding to Melania after that–as well as reports that Epstein’s account at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was not closed until October 2007. OnAugust 10, Epstein died in a federal jail cell; the death was ruled a suicide.

2022: Maxwell was convicted in federal court of the charges described above, and a federal judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison, though the Biden Administration sought a longer sentence, as noted in the sentencing recommendation noted below.

2025: The Trump administration moved Maxwell to a low security prison camp after she met with a top DOJ official, who had previously worked as Trump’s criminal defense attorney, as detailed in Part 1 of this column.

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What I’m reading:

Key Legal Filings related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

• If you need more details to combat the Trump-enabling spin machine trying to justify the immoral deal with the devil they are crafting to try to free Trump from this scandal, the Biden administration’s sentencing memo is stomach-churning. It details the truly awful ways in which this evil woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, exploited and abused teenaged girls to give sexual pleasure to Epstein and his friends.

• Here is a link to the trial transcript and to the charging document, too (Maxwell was found guilty on five of the six counts). You can also find Virginia Giuffre’s 2016 deposition in the case Maxwell ultimately settled with her, here. Kate Manne also recently detailed the allegations of a young woman who withdrew her complaint after Trump was first elected in 2016.

• The criminal complaint against Epstein is available here, and here is the non-prosecution agreement Alex Acosta made with Epstein back in 2007. (I have more details on Acosta’s role in the right-wing court capture machine in my book, Without Precedent.)

• Here is the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on that deal Acosta cut, detailing his “poor judgment” in letting Epstein basically skate on the charges that 32 girls–almost three dozen minors, at least as of 2006–were abused as part of Epstein’s scheme back then, some of whom were part of the charges against Maxwell, too. In other litigation, Epstein repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked about Maxwell’s role.

• The New York Times article about Epstein’s “lair” in Manhattan, which included a sculpture of a young woman in a bridal gown and veil climbing up or down a rope in his foyer–but let’s be clear, what the image implies is a young virgin seemingly trying to escape from someone. That article also notes that Epstein had a first edition of the novel Lolita, which blames a 12-year old for her rapes and the fantasies of a much older man. (The legal age of consent in Florida is 18.)

• And, I am still reading the U.S. Constitution.

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